The counter and combined rating Counter.nn.ru was a free Nizhny Novgorod statistics system that local sites signed themselves up to, and a public table in which they were ranked by a combined "rating" figure. The system operated from 2000 to 2016; the idea and technical specification belonged to Ilya Osipov, and it was built by Alexey Pavlov, a programmer at the company NN.RU. We do not have the system's database — there are nine pages that made it into the web archive: the home page from 1 March 2000 and eight rating snapshots from 2002 to 2016. Below is a breakdown of what can be seen in them and what cannot be said from them.

What exactly we counted

The snapshots are uneven: there are no captures for 2001, 2003, 2005-2007, 2009, 2011, and 2013, and we do not fill these in. The rating table has two numeric columns — "7-day rating" and "Visitors yesterday." How the rating was calculated is not explained in the snapshots, so we compare rating only against rating and do not convert it into people. The dates named below are the dates for which the figures are valid; they match the snapshot dates except for 2002, where the snapshot was taken on 1 September but the figures are as of 29 August. The snapshots fall in different seasons, including the New Year holidays. Seven rows survive for 2002, and almost all of them lack figures. A separate note on 2004: in spring the system suffered a failure with data loss and was being restored through May (see Counter.nn.ru), so the June snapshot was taken less than two months after the restoration.

1 March 2000: 392 sites, eight categories

The earliest snapshot is not a rating but the home page. The system was called "NN COUNTER v.2000," was signed "Free Nizhny Novgorod statistics system," and warned that it was in a testing stage. The directory listed 392 sites across eight categories: Projects — 106, Personalities — 104, Companies — 67, Society — 40, Science and education — 22, Media — 14, Directories — 7, Government — 6. The combined "rating" was 4392.02.[1]

The sum by category comes to 366 — 26 short of the stated 392; why some sites were not counted into a category is not visible from the snapshot. Personalities, at 104, is almost as many as Projects (106), and one and a half times more than Companies (67); there are six government sites. The combined "rating" on this page is recorded to hundredths, whereas in the 2002-2016 tables the rating is always an integer, so we do not compare these figures with each other.[1]

Leaders by year

SnapshotFirst place7-day ratingSecond place (rating)Ratio of 1st to 2nd
29.08.2002[2]Dmitry aka NRG's home pageno dataTACHKA.N1.RU (no data)no data
19.06.2004[3]WWW.NN.RU22,094NTA Privolzhye (20,635)1.07
12.01.2008[4]Nizhny Novgorod Online137,961WWW.NNOV.RU (44,635)3.09
28.04.2010[5]Nizhny Novgorod Online251,718NNTT.ORG (114,958)2.19
06.01.2012[6]Nizhny Novgorod Online252,206NNTT.ORG (230,085)1.10
09.02.2014[7]Nizhny Novgorod Online459,491WWW.NNOV.RU (114,776)4.00
15.03.2015[8]Nizhny Novgorod Online431,320NNTT.ORG (195,600)2.21
02.01.2016[9]Nizhny Novgorod Online535,961Novosti Nizhnego Novgoroda (83,118)6.45

From seven rows in 2002 to a top ten in 2008

In the snapshot dated 29 August 2002, at the top is "Dmitry aka NRG's home page," followed by "TACHKA.N1.RU — Nizhny Novgorod Automotive Project" (Vyacheslav Chaprak and Alexander Pimenov), then Teplokhod Plant", PLAY.NNOV.RU, "Socket5. Computers and components," the private educational institution "Binet," and "affordable apartments in Nizhny Novgorod" — the only row with a figure, a rating of 5.[2] Neither nn.ru nor nnov.ru — permanent fixtures at the top of all later snapshots — appear among these seven rows.

By June 2004 WWW.NN.RU (Internet Company NN.RU) is at the top — a rating of 22,094 and 6,266 visitors per day; second and third place belong to two rows of the NTA agency (20,635 and 19,760), fourth is NNOV (19,483), below them "Autoguide," "Portal R52," the AGDB collection of old games, AUTOINTERNET.RU, "PRIVAT," and Nizhny Novgorod Chat (chat.nn.ru).[3]

By January 2008 the leader's rating is 137,961 and 29,084 visitors, 6.2 times more than in June 2004. Second is WWW.NNOV.RU (44,635), third is NNOVER.RU (28,594), followed by "ZVUK VOKRUG (zvuk.nnov.ru)," the newspaper "Rabota dlya Vas", "Site of Friends," "Kolyuchy Sarov," "Svyazist," Birzha.ru", and "Avto.Nnov.Ru."[4] There are no more home pages among the names in this top ten: portals, industry sites, and publications.

File-sharing sites in the top of the rating

From 2010, sites that by their names relate to file sharing appear in the top ten. In April 2010 there are three of them: NNTT.ORG ("the Main Nizhny Novgorod Torrent Tracker", owner Bulldozer) — second place, 114,958; TORRENTS-NN.CN — fourth, 83,054; nn-files.ru ("a site in the Nizhny Novgorod File Ring Site of files") — sixth, 74,136. Together 272,148 — that is 32.3% of the top ten's combined rating and more than the single leader (251,718).[5]

In January 2012 the same three sites hold second, fourth, and fifth place, together 366,313 — 41.3% of the top ten's total. NNTT.ORG comes right up to the leader: 230,085 against 252,206, and by the "Visitors yesterday" column it actually surpasses it — 58,815 against 58,776. This is the only case in our sample where the second place beats the first in at least one metric.[6]

After that the sequence is uneven. In February 2014 there are two such sites in the top ten, in eighth and ninth place, their share 10.3%; NNTT.ORG's rating is 53,465 against 230,085 two years earlier, 4.3 times less.[7] In March 2015 NNTT.ORG is again second, 195,600 — 3.7 times more than a year earlier, share 18.2%.[8] In January 2016 it is in fifth place with 54,019, share 5.4%.[9] What caused these swings cannot be seen from the tables.

What fills the top ten in 2014-2016

In the last three snapshots, alongside portals and job sites, stand the online store "Mir Vyshivki" (World of Embroidery) (seventh place in 2014, third in 2015 with 75,064, fourth in 2016), the entertainment site NNPORTAL.ORG, "NN-MAMA," "Soyuz Pokupateley" (Union of Buyers) (tenth place in 2014), "Newsroom24.ru," KSTNEWS.RU, and the Torpedo Hockey Club — tenth place in 2016.[7][8][9]

Automotive sites appear in the top of the rating through 2008 inclusive: "TACHKA.N1.RU" in second place in 2002,[2] "Autoguide" (fifth) and AUTOINTERNET.RU (eighth) in 2004,[3] "Avto.Nnov.Ru" in tenth in 2008.[4] In the 2010-2016 snapshots there are no such names in the top ten.

Concentration: how many spots for one owner

The owner column shows how many rows of the top ten are recorded under one name. The maximum falls in 2004: Internet Company NN.RU holds three of the ten spots — first (WWW.NN.RU), ninth ("PRIVAT"), and tenth (Chat.nn.ru); two more rows, second and third, are taken by NTA news outlets, but are recorded under different owners — "NTA Privolzhye" and "NTA."[3] In 2008 two spots belong to "VVV.NNOV.RU" — second (WWW.NNOV.RU) and tenth ("Avto.Nnov.Ru"), while NN.RU holds only first.[4] In April 2010 there are no repeats at all: ten spots, ten different owners.[5] In 2012 and 2014 Internet Company NN.RU holds two spots each — nn.ru and nnover.ru,[6][7] in 2015 — again only first,[8] in January 2016 two, but consecutive: nn.ru and news.nn.ru.[9] No owner in our sample ever held more than three of the ten spots.

The leader and the gap to second place

From 2004, first place in all seven snapshots is held by the site of Internet Company NN.RU — first WWW.NN.RU, then "Nizhny Novgorod Online." Its rating: 22,094 (2004), 137,961 (2008), 251,718 (2010), 252,206 (2012), 459,491 (2014), 431,320 (2015), 535,961 (2016) — a 24.3-fold increase over twelve years. The sequence is uneven, though: between April 2010 and January 2012 the gain was 488 points, or 0.19%; between February 2014 and March 2015 the rating fell by 6.1%.

The ratio of the leader's rating to second place ranged from 1.07 in June 2004, when the gap was 1,459 points, to 6.45 in January 2016. Second place came almost as close to first in January 2012: 1.10, that is, a gap of 22,121 points against the leader's 252,206. The full series of ratios is in the table above.

A separate note on January 2016: the leader's rating in this snapshot is the highest, but "visitors yesterday" is 65,820 against 86,657 in March 2015, 24% less. The snapshot was taken on 2 January, and this daily column should be compared with the March one with caution.[9]

Changes of name and owner

NNOVER.RU is recorded under LLC "ENNOVER" in 2008 and 2010,[4][5] and under Internet Company NN.RU in 2012, and along with the owner the name changes too: "Nizhny Novgorod: What to Buy, Where to Go."[6] NNTT.ORG's owner is recorded as Bulldozer in 2010 and 2012, and as "Kisa Vorobyaninov" in 2014-2016. The site nnov.ru passes through four different owner records: "IP-CENTER www.nnov.ru" (2004), "VVV.NNOV.RU" (2008 and 2010), "Internet Company NNOV.RU" (2012 and 2014), "Internet Company NNOV.ORG" (2015 and 2016); the 2010 row shows the address nnov.ru, the 2012 one nnov.org, and by March 2015 the name changes too — WWW.NNOV.ORG.

The owner column was filled in loosely: sometimes it holds not a name but a number — "1817" for AGDB in 2004,[3] "2245" for "Birzha" in 2008;[4] in 2012 and 2014 there is one row without an owner in the top ten, in 2015 there are two. Kirill Astashov's "Kolyuchy Sarov" makes it into the top ten three times over eight years: seventh place in 2008, ninth in 2015 and in 2016, each time with the same owner record.

What can and cannot be judged from this dataset

What is useful in it is the observations about regional sites, captured by a single method, where the name, address, and owner stand in one row. From them one can see which projects existed as of the snapshot date, how their names and owner records changed, and in what order they ranked relative to one another.

The limitations matter just as much. Only sites that installed the counter themselves made it into the rating: this is not a census of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet, and a site's absence from the table proves nothing. The formula for the weekly rating is unknown, so the figures are fit for comparing rows against each other but not for converting into living people. Eight snapshots over fourteen years were taken in different seasons, and there is a three-and-a-half-year gap between June 2004 and January 2008: on such a grid one cannot speak of annual rates, nor of exactly when a given change occurred — only that the picture changed between two snapshots. Finally, the counter was made by the company whose site holds first place in seven of eight snapshots, and we have no independent verification of these figures.

Research conducted by the Nizhny Novgorod Encyclopedia on 13 August 2026 from snapshots of the counter.nn.ru combined rating in the web archive. Data analysis and calculations by the encyclopedia's editors; all figures are verifiable against the snapshots listed in the sources.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — NN COUNTER v.2000, home page of the counter.nn.ru system, web archive snapshot, 1 March 2000 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — counter.nn.ru, combined rating, web archive snapshot, 1 September 2002 (data as of 29.08.2002) (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — counter.nn.ru, combined rating, web archive snapshot, 19 June 2004 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — counter.nn.ru, combined rating, web archive snapshot, 12 January 2008 (archive)
  5. web.archive.org — counter.nn.ru, combined rating, web archive snapshot, 28 April 2010 (archive)
  6. web.archive.org — counter.nn.ru, combined rating, web archive snapshot, 6 January 2012 (archive)
  7. web.archive.org — counter.nn.ru, combined rating, web archive snapshot, 9 February 2014 (archive)
  8. web.archive.org — counter.nn.ru, combined rating, web archive snapshot, 15 March 2015 (archive)
  9. web.archive.org — counter.nn.ru, combined rating, web archive snapshot, 2 January 2016 (archive)