What happens when your internet access breaks down and stays broken all through one day and night? What do you miss most and when? Is it checking your favourite social network in the morning, sending e-mails in the afternoon, watching the last episode of your beloved series in the evening? Just try to think of your daily habits and routines as far as browsing the web is concerned – can a visible pattern be pointed out? In this blog post, some noticeable habits of Baltic internet users, will be portrayed with the help of gemiusTraffic data, and, just maybe, you will notice some similarities…

If you have ever surfed the internet, you definitely must have received an invitation to take part in an online survey. What is your first reaction to the question: Will you fill out the questionnaire? Even if it really takes the proverbial 5 minutes, a lot of internet users respond quickly by clicking a small icon at the top right corner of the box – ‘Close’. Within the online research industry finding the recipe for the survey that brings highest click-through-rate is almost like seeking a Holy Grail. There are no perfect solutions, maybe some universal rules, this is why the constant development of techniques and work on user-experience is inevitable. That is the reason why Gemius/IIBR engaged in ‘IniTech’ programme of the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education, aiming at improving the quality of its online surveys. But let’s start from the very beginning…

The Central and Eastern Europe region is everything but a homogenous one, although it may seem to be one at the first glance; in fact, each CEE country can pride itself in some other specific features. There is surely one which is of special interest of audience measurement providers, as the online population there grows quickly and steadily and the level of online advertisement industry development is high. A country of demanding and fully aware internet users, who do not hesitate to make use of the opportunities that the Web offers them. Which country is going to be discussed today? Czech Republic of course!

It`s true that nowadays so many things are available online – what about the school marks register? In Latvia it is already working and most of schools use the class registers in e-way! Let us present the ‘E-class’ (E-klase), pioneering system in CEE, that not only helps parents in keeping the track of the school achievements of their children. It is also a practical tool for communication between teachers and pupils thanks to which they can overcome the generation-gap and meet online. ‘Cause what is more natural for today’s kids and teenagers than texting and sending virtual messages?

Online audience study… gemiusAudience… comprehensive measurement… socio-demographical data and preferences of the internet users… media planning tool… – surely most of measuretheweb.com readers are acquainted with these concepts to some extent. But just as many scientists would like to witness the Big Bang, the origin of the universe, many of those interested in the online reality would like to gain more information on how a comprehensive internet audience measurement is introduced on a given market. Is it a painless process? Or, as with all great undertakings, several problems are obviously encountered at the beginning? And, most of all, why is it worth to decide on an introduction of a common measurement currency? These notions can be readily elaborated upon basing on the experience from the Israeli market where the first gemiusAudience study results have recently been published.

Santa Claus is coming to town with the accompaniment of jingle bells… We are sure you know such festive season songs very well… and sometimes you even get sick and tired of them, when you hunt for Christmas gifts. Obviously, not everyone likes to spend their time in shopping malls, but cheer up… there is an alternative – online shopping! The Free Shipping Day, a concept which came to Europe from the US, and is adapted by many e-stores in the Netherlands, United Kingdom and Poland, can surely encourage to shop online. But is it enough to make internet purchase a custom for Santa?

What does your floor has to do with the tropical deforestation in Borneo? A plastic bag with the death of the sea turtles? WWF brings answers to these and many other questions in its new social advertising campaign “SOS to the World”, accompanied by the research conducted by IIBR (Gemius Group).

A vast majority of interactive market experts all over the globe believe that the year 2012 will see a breakthrough in the online video. For some years already, Poland has also been expecting a significant rise in video ad spends. However, despite the fact that these expenses more than doubled in 2010 alone, they still account for only 2.2 percent of the entire internet advertising campaigns budgets (data from IAB AdEx 2010 FY). A slightly more dynamic growth is seen in the share of video content in display type ads: from 2 percent in 2009 to 5 percent in 2010 – according to the same research project, last year’s online ad campaign budgets earmarked 45 percent for display adverts.

Let’s think for a moment: in which EMEA country neither MSIE nor Mozilla Firefox nor even Google Chrome is the top browser? which regional browsers market is divided into almost three equal parts? The answer is simple and is going to be given in this post, continuing the cycle of texts “Around the EMEA region with top browsers”. The issues that are going to be discussed form inherent specificities of the internet of the Eastern region, which differ it significantly from the remaining part of the EMEA online reality. The markets covered herein will be none other than those of the three countries for which Gemius runs the gemiusRanking services – that is Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.

Let’s face it. Most of us have a bit of sweet tooth. Some maybe a little less, some just up to an obsession, but for the majority refusing a nice portion of a tasty pie would definitely be problematic. Still, as all measuretheweb.com readers know, this blog has no culinary aspirations but rather aims at discussing the current state of the internet. But, just to make the discussion more pleasant, let’s stick to that above-mentioned pie for one post at least. It will be no ordinary pie – but a Baltic internet pie!