IRES study: Romanians access internet daily and update their social network profiles at least weekly

Almost 2/3 of Romanians (64%) living in cities are using the internet, 71.4% of them accessing it on daily basis, mainly from home, the “Romanians and the internet” study from Romanian Strategy and Evaluation Institute (IRES) shows.

Also, 36% of Romanian internet users have accounts on socializing networks, the leader in this sector being Facebook. This way, 73.4% Romanians have a Facebook account, while 17.5% have one on Hi5. The country average percentage is 7.5%, lower than the European average.

When it comes about social networks profiles, Romanians are very busy updating personal info daily or at least a few times a week. In terms of online friends, 33% have less than 50, 17% – between 51 and 100, 22% – between 101 to 300 and 25% have over 300 online friends.

The main reasons Romanians have to navigate online are obtaining info, sending / receiving emails, reading, listening to music, online networking and music. Almost all Romanians (96%) are using the internet to inform themselves, while 83% are using it to send e-mails. Meanwhile, 30% are online to shop or to pay bills.

Online, Romanians are mainly interested on sports info (18%), entertainment and health (15% each), politics (14%) or usefull info (12%) and arts & culture (9%).

Because they like to surf online, Romanians do so mainly in the evening, 60% prefering to search the web from 6pm to 12 pm or from 10 am to 5pm – 26%.
A quarter of the respondents are very interested in internet and 37% are interested, while around 20% don’t care about those services.

A third of Romanian internet users are online from one to three hours on daily basis, with 30% of them spending between half an hour and an hour online.

To conect to Internet, Romanians are using fixed lines (46%) and cable (45%), with broadband connections being used only by 6% of the respondents.

Among the internet users, more than half have subscriptions to ClickNet/Romtelecom (52%), than to RCS&RDS (21%) and UPC (9%). Meanwhile, 4% use services provided by mobile communication providers, Orange (2%) and Vodafone (2%).

The most used browser in Romania is, according to IRES, Google Chrome (34.3%), followed by Mozilla Firefox (30.6%) and Internet Explorer (27.8%).

The main search engine in Romania is Google (89.2%), followed by Yahoo! (8.8%).

When it is about email, the most used service is from Yahoo! (76.1%), while only 9.2% respondents are using Gmail and 1.8% – Hotmail. Also, the Instant Messenging services are topped by Yahoo! Messenger – 71.3%, followed by Google Talk – 10.5%, Skype – 5.3% and “Windows messenger” – 2.5%.

IRES Study also show that 88% of Romanians have a mobile phone, 59% with subscription and 52% with prepaid card.

From the total number of Romanian interneet users, 17% have access to this service for over 8 years, while almost half (46%) access the interet for 4 to 7 years old. Almost 90% from the internet users are happy with the speed for online data transfer.

The study was realized on February 23rd and 24th, on 1,146 people living in urban area.