Russia's blogger market grew to 69.2 billion rubles

What did the comparison with Roskomnadzor data yield?

For the first time, the blogger market estimate was compared with preliminary data on budget volumes from ORD/ERIR for 2025. The indicators reflect different cuts: AKAR counts the KOL blogger segment through CPV, while RKN data includes the total volume of labeled advertising on the platform — including placements in public pages and media accounts.

On comparable platforms, AKAR's estimate amounted to 69.23 billion rubles versus 64.04 billion rubles according to Roskomnadzor. The largest discrepancy was recorded in Telegram: 21.97 billion per AKAR versus 35.07 billion per RKN — possibly because the regulator's data includes channels not tied to a specific person. For YouTube, the picture is reversed: 23.97 billion per AKAR versus 9.59 billion per RKN. The study attributes this to differences in the distribution of costs for multi-platform placements.

Another factor in the discrepancy is the difference between ad placement and content production. RKN data records placement costs, whereas in blogger inventory, the cost often includes content production, which is not labeled separately.

"This year, the value of the study for us has grown significantly: now we have not just a market snapshot, but a point of comparison with the 2024 measurement, so we can see real dynamics and changes within individual platforms. Comparing fundamentally different sources allows us to draw conclusions that the market could previously only speculate about," said Apollinaria Dvurechenskaya, co-chair of the AKAR Influencer Marketing Committee and CEO of Dve Reki Group.

How concentrated is the market?

The market remains highly concentrated. Three quarters of the monetary volume — 75.62% — is generated by the top 500 advertisers. Concentration has slightly decreased: in 2024, the top 500 accounted for about 80% of the market.

• top 100 — 50.60% of the budget;
• top 200 — 61.66%;
• top 500 — 75.62%;
• top 1000 — 85.18%;
• top 2000 — 92.84%.

What awaits the market in 2026?

According to WhoIsBlogger, the market continued to grow in monetary terms; however, the total volume of blogger content views decreased by approximately 26%. The main driver of growth, according to Ksenia Golovacheva, head of the WhoIsBlogger project office and measurement partner, was media inflation.

"In 2026, we expect this structural transformation to continue. The market in monetary terms may maintain slight positive dynamics, but pressure on the volume of available advertising attention will intensify. In these conditions, a competitive advantage is no longer the ability to buy more contacts, but the ability to extract more value from each contact," Golovacheva notes.

AKAR emphasizes that the market structure has become more distributed across platforms due to the growth of Telegram and VK, the appearance of TikTok in the measurement, and the increase in RUTUBE's volume. YouTube and Instagram*, meanwhile, retained significant market volumes despite declines in monetary terms.

*Social networks Instagram and Facebook are banned in the Russian Federation; they are owned by Meta corporation, recognized as extremist in the Russian Federation.