Digital In Ukraine 2022: General Trends and the Impact of War on Internet Behaviour

MarTech agency newage. prepared an annual study of Internet trends in Ukraine. Experts told how much time people spend online, what sites they browse, what applications they use, and what content they consume. Particular attention was paid to how the Russian invasion affected the digital habits of Ukrainians.

The first thing that was investigated in newage. is the general audience of Internet users in Ukraine. In order to calculate their number, the agency processed information on the number of people who left Ukraine and also calculated the number of people who ended up under occupation. Aggregating all the data, we can record that for May-June in Ukraine, there are ~22.1 million citizens aged 14-70 in the unoccupied territory, of which about 19 million use the Internet.

A significant part of the research is devoted to Ukrainian content consumption and digital habits. So, in March, we started reading more news, of the 20 most popular sites, seven are social and political mass media, and we will call two more conditional news: Telegram and YouTube.

But in April-May the situation changed, the traffic of news sites began to fall, instead, e-commerce sites received more attention. Educational sites such as 'Naurok' and Brainly (Znanija.com) have also grown.

It is also worth considering the applications that Ukrainians have been using since the beginning of the invasion. The illustration below shows the TOP-20 applications by installations on Android devices with a comparison from March 2022 to December 2021. In the top four new applications that were not in the 2021 study: VpnDialogs, Google Pay, YT Music and TikTok. Shazam, AliExpress, My Vodafone and Rozetka dropped from the list of the most popular.

It is also possible to conclude about an increase in business activity, because in April the workload of advertising agencies and platforms increased.

“Today, marketing outsourcing can and should become the second IT of our economy. We have strong technical specialists who are valued and loved by Western companies. And now is the time to make a statement at the event as an industry, because we are seeing tremendous support and understanding. Marketers, like IT experts, can become the driving force that exports services and brings currency to the country,” said the co-founder of the newage agency." Oleksiy Lyakh.

If we talk about global trends in Ukrainian digital until February, our Internet coverage level is at the level of other Eastern European countries — 86% (last year it was 82%).

The full presentation can be found on the agency’s website.

The research methodology is close to meta-analysis. Specialists collect data from various sources, verify them and build their own conclusions. The study is based on the agency’s own data and also includes statistics from:

• Kantar Ukraine;
• Internet World Stats;
• All-Ukrainian Advertising Coalition;
• Google Trends;
• IAB Ukraine;
• Social Media Week Kyiv;
• Statista and others.