When the social network Instagram was officially blocked on March 14 (banned in the Russian Federation), its audience in Russia was about 38.1 million active authors. TikTok has introduced its own restrictions on work in Russia since March 6, with more than 31 million daily visitors. YouTube even earlier turned off advertising and monetization for Russia, where more than 80 million people use the service. All this forced the largest bloggers and celebrities who make money on advertising integrations to start more actively maintaining accounts in other, Russian social networks. And some - to open their pages there for the first time.
It should be noted that mostly bloggers were unable to transfer their audience to other social networks. On average, the share of subscribers on VKontakte compared to the main social networks of content makers was 4%, and on Telegram it was even less - only 3%.
The favorite of the public, however, was Morgenstern. The fans supported the musician, and about 2.6 million people signed up for the artist on VK, which is 32.7% of his audience on Instagram (banned in the Russian Federation) and 22.3% of the number of subscribers on YouTube.
Instagram divas also have above-average results. Makeup artist Gohar Avetisyan gained an audience of almost a million people on Telegram in just two weeks (8.6% of her Instagram account). Insta blogger Valeria Chekalina transferred 10.9% of her audience to Telegram, which is 1.1 million people. About 1.2 million fans were subscribed to the channel of the host Ksenia Borodina as of March 15, which is 6.6% of her previous audience on Instagram (banned in the Russian Federation).
But the popular tiktokers have mostly failed in the task of transferring the audience to other social networks. On average, 1.5% of their audience switched to the Telegram channels of tiktokers and 1.7% to VK. The most devoted subscribers, however, ended up with Instasamka: 6% of her audience moved to Telegram and 5.7% to VK.
YouTubers wasted no time and asked their fans to subscribe to Russian social networks, even if not everyone was successful. On average, the share of transitions from YouTube to the social network VK is 4.8%, while in Telegram it is only 2.2%. This difference is due to the fact that VK provides a more convenient format for publishing and watching videos than Telegram. So, gaming bloggers Marmok and Kuplinov ► Play transferred more than 10% of the audience to VK, and Katya Klep boasts 21.9% of her YouTube subscribers in VK (however, she has had a VKontakte page since 2014) .
There were also those who completely left social networks. Dmitry Nagiyev said goodbye to his followers on Instagram (banned in the Russian Federation), without specifying another social network for communicating with fans. And the presenter Ivan Urgant introduced himself in his Telegram channel as a 23-year-old designer from St. Petersburg and, having not written a single post since then, gathered 210 thousand subscribers.
Alexander Anokhin, head of the monitoring and analysis department: “Although according to Mediascope, it was Telegram that showed the largest increase in new users, this obviously affected personal contacts first of all. For the transition of the audience of bloggers, VK turned out to be more successful. Despite the presence of channels and other functions, Telegram is still perceived as a messenger, and VK provides bloggers with much more tools. In addition, many of the previously created pages were preserved, which facilitated the migration. In connection with the recognition on March 21 of Meta (and hence Instagram) as an extremist organization in Russia, we can expect a new wave of blogging audiences to flow to Russian social networks”.
Methodology: the study is based on an assessment of the dynamics of the number of subscribers of 60 leading bloggers Instagram (banned in the Russian Federation), TikTok and YouTube for 2021 according to the IAS "Medialogy". The number of subscribers and their change from January 1 to March 15, 2022 are taken into account.