newage. Digital Research 2024
As every year, newage.agency conducted its own research of Ukrainian digital. Let's take a look at the part of the 2024 study.
Ukraine is in a state of war that affects all spheres of life, including the economy and digital technologies. Despite the challenges, Ukrainians demonstrate remarkable resilience and ability to adapt to new conditions. This is also reflected in digital habits and trends, which are actively developing even in times of crisis.
The Ukrainian digital market demonstrates significant potential and opens up new opportunities for advertising and business. Every year, newage. agency researches the Ukrainian digital landscape, and here we will provide interesting figures on the state of our own domestic market, as well as share insights on advertising tools that will be useful for all digital marketers.
Number of population and digital consumers
The first thing to understand about any market is its size, the number of potential consumers. We are no longer seeing such a significant outflow of population as we did in 2022-23, but the population continues to decline during the war. Currently, Ukraine has 30.4 million people, of whom 17.9 million are Internet users and potential online advertising audiences.
We emphasise that this number does not include children, and we have deliberately excluded online users of online businesses from the sample (this does not include children and people over 70). The illustration below also shows the gender and age distribution of users.
We calculated this figure based on historical data from the State Statistics Service (which currently does not publish demographic reports). We also used public information on the number of internally displaced persons, data on Ukrainian refugees registered by the UN, as well as information from advertising systems about the potential reach of the adult audience.
Number of Ukrainians in other countries
Since 2022, millions of Ukrainians have moved abroad. Most of them are children, but the number of adults and potentially economically active Ukrainians abroad can also be judged by data on digital activity.
Thus, according to our data, the number of Ukrainian refugees continues to grow, but at a much slower pace than in 2022-23. As of May 2024, there were 4.2 million Ukrainian Internet users abroad (excluding children).
In previous years, the largest number of our refugees were based in Poland, but in 2024, Germany became the leader in safe haven. The rest of the leading countries are listed on the slide below.
As far as we can tell from surveys and external research, these people are gradually integrating into the communities in which they find themselves. For example, according to the Centre for Economic Strategy, in May 2023, most refugees (65%) claimed that they felt better in Ukraine than in a foreign country. However, already in January 2024, 61% claimed that the country of asylum was better than it was at home. No matter how painful it is to read such data, we are grateful to all the nations and governments that have sheltered our people.
When it comes to the reasons that might motivate people to return home, it is mostly about the factors surrounding the war: the end of the war, the cessation of hostilities in the respondent’s home region, or the cessation of Russian bombing of Ukrainian cities.
Of course, people do not forget about social factors: rising living standards and rising salaries are also important factors. At the same time, the termination of support in the country of asylum is the least influential factor in the decision to return.
"Brands should not forget that there are Ukrainians abroad who did not leave of their own free will or because of a good life. And you should communicate with them, build relationships and brand knowledge in order to interact with them either now or in the future.” says Oleksandr Rolsky, CEO of newage.
It should be noted that we, for our part, are working on all the points that are important for refugees. Yes, the IMF’s economic forecast for Ukraine is relatively positive. After the shock of 2022, we are seeing a decrease in unemployment, an increase in wages, and a decrease in inflation. The year 2024 is much better than the previous two in terms of key macroeconomic indicators; it is even catching up with the 'pre-war' year 2021 in some places.
Digital habits of the Ukrainian audience
The trend we have been noting since 2022, and which continues to this day, is interest in news. In the 2022 research, we observed a surge in traffic to news sites, and in 2023 we cited a study that showed that 98% of Ukrainians read news every day. The USAID survey shows that interest in news remains high among the Ukrainian audience, and researchers call social media (which includes the Telegram messenger) the main source of news. But traditional media also retain influence over certain audiences.
Social networks are more popular among Ukrainians aged 18-35, while Ukrainians over 46 make up the majority of the TV, radio, and press audience,” the USAID authors summarise.
In general, Ukrainians are very involved in the digital world. According to colleagues from Kantar, each Ukrainian has 3.8 devices for accessing the Internet: smartphones, computers, tablets, SmartTVs, and other devices. Among them, the absolute favourite and the window to the digital world is the smartphone – Ukrainians spend an average of 6 hours on it online.
We spend 11.4 hours a day on all these devices. The graphs below show the breakdown by device, and the dynamics of usage in different years.
A significant share of online time is spent watching videos. Ukrainians spend 2.5 hours a day watching videos on YouTube and another 1.6 hours watching other streaming videos (movies, TV content, etc.).
And such online activity attracts advertisers. Ukraine’s advertising market is recovering, local and international brands are adapting to the conditions we are in and continue to do business and create advertising campaigns.
Digital has become an absolute favourite in terms of investment. For the third year in a row, the volume of investments in digital advertising has exceeded the volume of investments in offline advertising.
Among the many advantages of digital over offline promotion, we believe the key is its adaptability. An advertising campaign can be easily 'screwed' or vice versa, depending on the circumstances, which is not offered by radio advertising, TV formats, and even more so by OOH (Out Of Home) advertising,” consider newage.
We will talk about this in more detail later, where we will describe the main advertising formats and the cost of their use over the past year for YouTube (as a media platform), as well as Google Ads, Display and Video 360, Facebook, Instagram.
Advertising tools
We have thoroughly researched advertising tools and how they work in the Ukrainian market and found a number of insights that can be useful for marketers around the world. So, we’ll leave the full version with Ukrainian prices and audience sizes in the original study (you can share it with your Ukrainian colleagues), but here we’ll look at the top insights.
Continue reading here: newage. Digital Research 2024
