Full-fledged digital “import substitution” of social networks in the Russian Federation has not been achieved. Hope for domestic video services
Journalists analyzed the entire market for a year and found that statements about digital import substitution in the Russian Federation, made in March 2022, are very different from what we received during this time.
In March 2022, foreign social networks were accused of extremism; in the Russian Federation, the task arose to fill the digital vacuum. A year has passed and all these promised “RosGrams” did not live up to expectations, they did not even come out. As the journalists of Sensation.Net emphasize, who carried out a kind of “inventory” of all the promises in their material, the initial problem was that they declared and created “analogues”, and not their own unique service.
It’s just that the problem of the iron information curtain turned out to be easily solved through free VPN services. However, someone decided to go all-in and began to master domestic digital products. As a result of “import substitution”, the Russian Federation has its own application store, RuStore, instead of the “foreign” Google Play. This is where the great breakthroughs of domestic developers ended.
Over the past year, we have also created applications such as Rossgram, QR.me, LOOKY, Grustnogram, Now, YaRus, Runiversalis and Yandex.Zen, and activated RuTube and VK Video. However, most of them have not yet become popular among Russian users; their work is extremely unstable. The Russian analogue of Wikipedia, Runiversalis, which declares a respectful attitude to the requirements of the legislation of the Russian Federation, suppressing left-liberal edits of articles, also did not take off. The reason for this is the lack of proper advertising, the haste of developers and technical breakdowns - a set of failed digital projects.
With new social networks, the situation is even more complicated. One gets the impression that project managers immediately want to create a sterile online society, forgetting that VK, Odnoklassniki or Telegram from the very beginning developed spontaneously and did not lend themselves to strict control. There is only one new product presented in Russia - YaRus, a program for collecting metadata on Instagram* and YouTube. She analyzed trending topics, likes, comments and other parameters that affect the perception of content. At the initial stage, it was more of a B2B platform for bloggers, and then a social element was added to YaRus. The platform offered to read news, watch videos, follow events and develop as bloggers. However, the resource crashed due to a Ddos attack or a large influx of users.
Creating a worthy competitor to YouTube is also very difficult for Russian developers and PR people. At the moment, there are three options where you can escape from YouTube - RuTube, VK Video and Yandex.Zen. But none of these platforms have yet been able to attract the attention of Russian users.
In an attempt to create a domestic service at the level of Youtube, domestic programmers are invited to take part Competition “Video Revolution” with a very solid prize fund of 100 million rubles for the development of a suitable resource. Smart specialists were given an incentive to create a domestic product for very good money.
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