Social networks

Social networks are visited by almost 60 percent of Latvia’s Internet users and most of the audience are women, according to Gemius.

For many years the online social network Draugiem.lv that was formed in 2004 enjoyed huge popularity. After only three years in spring 2007, it had already attracted one million users, over half of them based in Latvia. Draugiem.lv is available in Latvian, Russian and English on PCs and mobile devices. Comparing summer indicators for 2012 and 2015, the average time spent per month by a user on the portal from a PC fell from 19 to 12 hours. In spring 2016  among the top websites in Latvia (for average daily visitors)  there was Facebook in fourth place but Draugiem.lv in sixth, which is also a high rating. In addition, it should be pointed out that Draugiem.lv is a suitable place for children and seniors to learn about the essence of social media as well as for others who have only begun to use the Internet. Over half of Latvia’s population (55 percent) uses smart phones, which is more than 8 percentage points more than in spring 2015. In turn, 22 percent of the population uses tablet PCs, which is 3 percentage points more than in spring 2015.