Counter and cumulative ranking Counter.nn.ru — a Nizhny Novgorod free statistics system that local websites joined voluntarily, paired with a public table ranking them by a cumulative metric called "rating." The system operated from 2000 to 2016; the concept and specifications belonged to Ilya Osipov, and it was built by NN.RU programmer Alexey Pavlov. Rating data has survived in nine web-archive pages: the home page as of March 1, 2000, and eight rating snapshots from 2002 to 2016. Below is an account of what they reveal — and what they cannot tell us.

A named list of the websites in question has been compiled in the section "Archaeology of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet" and in the collection "Archaeology of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet".

What exactly we measured

The snapshots are unevenly distributed: no records exist for 2001, 2003, 2005–2007, 2009, 2011, or 2013. The rating table has two columns of figures — "7-day Rating" and "Visitors Yesterday." How the rating was calculated is not explained in any snapshot, so the rating can only be compared with other rating figures and cannot be converted into a visitor count. The dates given below are the dates to which the figures apply; they match the snapshot dates except for 2002, where the snapshot was taken on September 1 but the figures are as of August 29. The snapshots fall in different seasons, including the New Year holiday period. Only seven rows survived for 2002, and nearly all of them lack figures. A separate caveat applies to 2004: in the spring the system suffered a failure with data loss and was not restored until May (see Counter.nn.ru), meaning the June snapshot was taken less than two months after recovery.

March 1, 2000: 392 sites, eight categories

The earliest snapshot is not a ranking page but the home page. The system was called "NN COUNTER v.2000," described itself as the "Nizhny Novgorod Free Statistics System," and noted that it was still in the debugging stage. The directory listed 392 sites across eight categories: Projects — 106, Personalities — 104, Companies — 67, Society — 40, Science and Education — 22, Mass Media — 14, Directories — 7, Government — 6. Total "rating" — 4,392.02.[1]

Adding up the categories gives 366 — 26 fewer than the stated 392; why some sites were excluded from the category count is not apparent from the snapshot. Personalities numbered 104 — nearly as many as Projects (106) and one and a half times more than Companies (67); government sites numbered six. The total "rating" on this page is given with two decimal places, whereas in the 2002–2016 tables the rating is always a whole number, so these figures are not compared with each other.[1]

Year-by-year leaders

SnapshotFirst place7-day ratingSecond place (rating)Ratio of 1st to 2nd
29.08.2002[2]Dmitry aka NRG's Personal Homepageno dataTACHKA.N1.RU (no data)no data
19.06.2004[3]WWW.NN.RU22,094Volga Region (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 Online535,961Nizhny Novgorod News (83,118)6.45

From Seven Lines in 2002 to a Top Ten in 2008

In the snapshot dated 29 August 2002, the top spot goes to "Dmitry aka NRG's Home Page," followed by "TACHKA.N1.RU — Nizhny Novgorod Automotive Project" (Vyacheslav Chaprak and Aleksandr Pimenov), then JSC Nizhny Novgorod Teplokhod Plant, PLAY.NNOV.RU, "Socket5. Computers and Components," the private educational institution "Binet," and "affordable apartments in Nizhny Novgorod" — the only entry with a numerical rating, ranked 5.[2] Neither nn.ru nor nnov.ru — fixtures at the top of every subsequent snapshot — appear anywhere in these seven lines.

By June 2004, the top spot belongs to WWW.NN.RU (Internet company NN.RU) — rating 22,094 and 6,266 visitors per day; second and third places go to two listings from the NTA agency (20,635 and 19,760), fourth to NNOV (19,483), with "Avtogid," "Portal R52," the retro-games collection AGDB, AUTOINTERNET.RU, "PRIVAT," and Chat.nn.ru following below.[3]

By January 2008, the leader's rating stands at 137,961 with 29,084 visitors — 6.2 times more than in June 2004. Second place goes to WWW.NNOV.RU (44,635), third to NNOVER.RU (28,594), followed by "ZVUK VOKRUG," the newspaper Rabota dlya Vas, "Sayt Druzey," "Kolyuchy Sarov," "Svyazist," the weekly Birzha, and "Avto.Nnov.Ru."[4] Not a single personal home page remains among the names in this top ten: portals, industry-specific sites, and publications have taken over.

File Sharing in the Upper Reaches of the Rankings

From 2010 onward, the top ten includes sites whose names identify them with file sharing. 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") — sixth, 74,136. Together they total 272,148 — 32.3% of the combined ratings of the top ten and more than the single leader alone (251,718).[5]

In January 2012 the same three sites occupy second, fourth, and fifth place, with a combined total of 366,313 — 41.3% of the top ten's sum. NNTT.ORG closes in on the leader: 230,085 against 252,206, and in the "Visitors yesterday" column it actually surpasses it — 58,815 against 58,776. This is the only instance in which second place outperforms first place on even a single metric.[6]

Further down, the rankings are uneven. In February 2014, two such sites appear in the top ten — eighth and ninth place — with a combined share of 10.3%; NNTT.ORG's rating stands at 53,465, compared with 230,085 two years earlier — 4.3 times lower.[7] In March 2015, NNTT.ORG is again in second place with 195,600 — 3.7 times more than the previous year, with a share of 18.2%.[8] In January 2016, it sits in fifth place with 54,019, a share of 5.4%.[9] What caused these fluctuations is not apparent from the tables.

What fills the top ten in 2014–2016

In the three most recent snapshots, alongside portals and job sites appear the online shop "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" ("Buyers' Union") (tenth place in 2014), "Newsroom24.ru," KSTNEWS.RU, and Torpedo Hockey Club — tenth place in 2016.[7][8][9]

Automotive sites appear in the upper part of the rankings through 2008: "TACHKA.N1.RU" in second place in 2002,[2] "Avtogid" (fifth) and AUTOINTERNET.RU (eighth) in 2004,[3] and "Avto.Nnov.Ru" in tenth place in 2008.[4] In the 2010–2016 snapshots, no such names appear in the top ten.

Concentration: how many spots belong to a single owner

The owner column shows how many of the top ten entries are registered to a single name. The peak falls in 2004: internet company NN.RU holds three of the ten spots — first (WWW.NN.RU), ninth ("PRIVAT"), and tenth (Chat.nn.ru); another two entries, second and third, belong to NTA news but are registered to different owners — "NTA Privolzhye" and "NTA".[3] In 2008, "VVV.NNOV.RU" holds two spots — second (WWW.NNOV.RU) and tenth ("Avto.Nnov.Ru"), while NN.RU holds only first place.[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 only first place again,[8] and in January 2016 two spots, but consecutive: nn.ru and news.nn.ru.[9] No single owner has ever held more than three of the ten spots.

The leader and the gap to second place

Since 2004, first place in all seven snapshots has been held by the website of internet company NN.RU — initially WWW.NN.RU, later "Nizhny Novgorod Online". Its ratings: 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 series is uneven, however: 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 that of 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, meaning 22,121 points against the leader's 252,206. The full series of ratios appears in the table above.

A note on January 2016: the leader's rating in that snapshot is the highest in the series, yet "visitors yesterday" stood at 65,820, compared with 86,657 in March 2015 — 24% lower. The snapshot was taken on 2 January, so comparisons of that daily column with the March figure should be made with caution.[9]

Name and ownership changes

NNOVER.RU is registered to LLC "ENNOVER" in 2008 and 2010,[4][5] and in 2012 to internet company NN.RU, with the display name changing along with the owner: "Nizhny Novgorod: What to Buy, Where to Go".[6] NNTT.ORG lists its owner as Bulldozer in 2010 and 2012, and as "Kisa Vorob'yaninov" in 2014–2016. The site nnov.ru passes through four different owner entries: "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 entry lists the address nnov.ru, the 2012 entry nnov.org, and by March 2015 the display name has also changed — to WWW.NNOV.ORG.

The owner column was filled in inconsistently: sometimes it contains not a name but a number — "1817" for AGDB in 2004,[3] "2245" for "Birzha" in 2008;[4] in 2012 and 2014 the top ten each had one row with no owner listed, in 2015 there were two. Kirill Astashov's "Kolyuchy Sarov" appears in the top ten three times over eight years: seventh place in 2008, ninth in 2015 and 2016, each time with the same owner entry.

What can and cannot be concluded from this dataset

Its value lies in the observations it provides on regional sites captured by a single methodology, where the name, address, and owner appear in the same row. From these it is possible to see which projects existed at the time of each snapshot, how their names and owner records changed, and the order in which they ranked relative to one another.

The limitations are equally important. Only sites that had installed the counter themselves were included in the rankings: 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 ranking is unknown, so the numbers are suitable for comparing rows with one another but not for converting into unique visitors. The eight snapshots spanning fourteen years were taken in different seasons, with a gap of three and a half years between June 2004 and January 2008: a grid like this permits no conclusions about annual rates of change or about when exactly any particular change occurred — only that the picture changed between two snapshots. Finally, the counter was created by a company whose site holds first place in seven of the eight snapshots, and no independent verification of these figures exists.

This study was conducted by the Encyclopedia of Nizhny Novgorod on 13 August 2026, based on snapshots of the counter.nn.ru consolidated rankings retrieved from the web archive. Data analysis and calculations were carried out by the encyclopedia's editorial team; all figures can be verified against the snapshots listed in the sources.

Sources

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