Paul Goble
Staunton, June 22 – Russian media are losing their audiences for many of the same reasons that their counterparts in other countries are: people are tired of bad news and feel a sense of information overload and at the same time aggregator algorithms like Google are summarizing media products in ways that mean people don’t have to go to the originals.
Such downward pressure is costing many media outlets their audiences even if such newspapers and websites are able to escape pressures to conform from the authorities, commentator Denis Yakovlev writes (mostmedia.org/ru/posts/novosti-bez-chitateley-pochemu-smi-terjajut-auditoriju-po-vsemu-miru-i-kak-eto-proishodit-v-rossii).
These two factors are hitting media at all levels in the Russian Federation. Between May 2025 and May 2026, Russians turned to internet media sites far less often. In Moscow, the decline was from 17.2 million users a month to only 12.3 million this May. At the regional and local level, the declines were even more precipitous, by almost 50 percent or even more.
Consequently, any analysis of the Russian media scene must recognize this and not ascribe them to Kremlin actions alone. Indeed, Yakovlev suggests, the impact of the popular desire to avoid bad news and the willingness of people to use aggregator summaries rather than go to originals may be even more important.
If these twin factors continue to operate, many of the media operations that now offer their own product will close regardless of whether the Kremlin seeks that outcome or not in an particular case; and the amount of genuinely produced news will decline perhaps even more than those around Putin in fact want.
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