YouTube In Russia Slowed Down To Record Low

The time it takes for a video to start playing has increased tenfold.

YouTube's speed in Russia dropped to a record low in early September. This was shown by an analysis of user traffic by Vigo, the results of which were published by Izvestia.

According to the data obtained, the average time it takes for a video to start playing for users of fixed-line networks has increased almost 10-fold — from 1.21 seconds in early June to 11.01 seconds in early September.

At the same time, mobile operators' download speed has dropped more than twofold — from 1.76 seconds in June to 3.83 seconds in September.

At the same time, the share of videos that take more than 3 seconds to start playing was only 2.8% in June, and now more than half — 56.7% — are “slow”. In general, viewers from Russia have to wait five times longer for a video to start playing: 9.49 seconds versus 1.27 seconds in June.

Against this background, the number of cases when users closed the video without waiting for the first frame increased fivefold — from 3% in June to 15% in September.

Also, the slowdown of the video hosting led to the fact that Russians began to watch YouTube twice as rarely, and the total views decreased by 52%. At the same time, Russians increasingly watch videos in lower quality.

“Previously, users of fixed networks usually opened videos with a resolution of FullHD (1080p) and a frequency of 30 frames per second (with H.264 encoding), and mobile — HD (720p). The new reality of a YouTube user is as follows: on fixed operators, if you're lucky, it will be a “big pixel in the middle of the screen” — 360p, and on mobile operators — SD quality (480p),” says Anton Prokopenko, Director of Products at Vigo.

The Russian authorities began to slow down YouTube at the end of July.

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