The counter and aggregate ranking of Counter.nn.ru — a free Nizhny Novgorod statistics system that local websites joined voluntarily, and a public table in which those sites were ranked by a composite metric called "rating." The system operated from 2000 to 2016; the concept and specifications were created by Ilya Osipov, and it was built by NN.RU programmer Alexey Pavlov. We do not have the system's database — only nine pages captured in the web archive: the homepage as of March 1, 2000, and eight rating snapshots from 2002 to 2016. Below is an analysis of what those snapshots show and what conclusions they cannot support.

A named list of the websites discussed here is collected in the section Category: Defunct Nizhny Novgorod Websites and Media" and in the collection "Archaeology of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet."

What exactly we counted

The snapshots are unevenly spaced: no captures exist for 2001, 2003, 2005–2007, 2009, 2011, or 2013, and we have not reconstructed them. The rating table has two numeric columns — "7-day rating" and "Visitors yesterday." The snapshots do not explain how the rating was calculated, so we compare rating figures only against other rating figures and do not convert them into visitor counts. The dates cited below are the dates to which the numbers 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 survive from 2002, and nearly all 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 the restoration.

March 1, 2000: 392 sites, eight categories

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

Adding up the category totals gives 366 — 26 fewer than the stated 392; why some sites were excluded from the category count is not apparent from the snapshot. There were 104 Individuals — almost as many as Projects (106) and one and a half times more than Companies (67); government sites numbered six. The aggregate "rating" on this page is recorded to two decimal places, whereas in the 2002–2016 tables the rating is always a whole number, so we do not compare these figures against 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 Homepageno 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 August 29, 2002 snapshot, the top entry is "Dmitry aka NRG's Homepage," followed by "TACHKA.N1.RU — The Nizhny Novgorod Automotive Project" (Vyacheslav Chaprak and Aleksandr Pimenov), then JSC Zavod Nizhegorodsky Teplohod, PLAY.NNOV.RU, "Socket5. Computers and Components," NEI "Binet," and "inexpensive apartments in Nizhny Novgorod" — the only row with a figure, a rating of 5.[2] Neither nn.ru nor nnov.ru — which appear in the upper portion of every subsequent snapshot — are among these seven rows.

By June 2004, the top entry is WWW.NN.RU (Internet company NN.RU) with a rating of 22,094 and 6,266 visitors per day; second and third places go to two NTA agency listings (20,635 and 19,760), fourth is NNOV (19,483), followed by "Avtogid," "Portal R52," the classic games collection AGDB, AUTOINTERNET.RU, "PRIVAT," and Nizhny Novgorod Chat.[3]

By January 2008, the leader's rating had reached 137,961 with 29,084 visitors — 6.2 times more than in June 2004. Second was WWW.NNOV.RU (44,635), third NNOVER.RU (28,594), then "SOUND ALL AROUND (zvuk.nnov.ru)," the newspaper "Rabota dlya Vas", "Sayt Druzey," "Kolyuchy Sarov," "Svyazist," Birzha.ru", and "Avto.Nnov.Ru."[4] No personal homepages appear among the ten entries: only portals, sector-specific sites, and publications.

File-sharing sites in the upper ranking

From 2010 onward, sites associated with file sharing appear in the top ten. In April 2010, three of them are present: NNTT.ORG (torrent tracker) (NNTT.ORG (torrent tracker))," owner Bulldozer) — second place, 114,958; TORRENTS-NN.CN — fourth, 83,054; nn-files.ru ("A site in the Site of the Nizhny Novgorod File Ring") — sixth, 74,136. Combined: 272,148 — 32.3% of the total rating of the top ten, and more than the leader alone (251,718).[5]

In January 2012, the same three sites occupy second, fourth, and fifth places, with a combined total of 366,313 — 41.3% of the top ten's sum. NNTT.ORG comes extremely close to the leader: 230,085 versus 252,206, and in the "Visitors yesterday" column it actually surpasses it — 58,815 versus 58,776. This is the only instance in the Nizhny Novgorod website census where second place exceeds first place on even one metric.[6]

After that the pattern is uneven. In February 2014, two such sites appear in the top ten, at eighth and ninth places, with a combined share of 10.3%; NNTT.ORG's rating is 53,465, compared to 230,085 two years earlier — 4.3 times lower.[7] In March 2015, NNTT.ORG is second again with 195,600 — 3.7 times higher than the previous year, with a share of 18.2%.[8] In January 2016, it is fifth with 54,019, a share of 5.4%.[9] The tables do not reveal what caused these swings.

What fills the top ten in 2014–2016

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

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

Concentration: how many slots one owner holds

The owner column shows how many top-ten rows are registered to a single name. The maximum occurs 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 held by NTA news listings but registered to 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 repeat owners at all: ten spots, ten different owners.[5] In 2012 and 2014, Internet company NN.RU holds two spots — nn.ru and nnover.ru;[6][7] in 2015 only first place again;[8] in January 2016, two consecutive spots: nn.ru and news.nn.ru.[9] No single owner has ever held more than three of the ten spots in the Nizhny Novgorod website census.

The leader and the gap to second place

From 2004 onward, first place in all seven snapshots belongs to a site operated by Internet company NN.RU — first WWW.NN.RU, then "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 second place ranged from 1.07 in June 2004, when the difference was 1,459 points, to 6.45 in January 2016. Second place came nearly as close to first in January 2012: a ratio of 1.10, meaning a gap of 22,121 points against the leader's 252,206. The full series of ratios appears in the table above.

A note on January 2016: that snapshot shows the highest leader rating in the series, yet "visitors yesterday" was 65,820 — down 24% from 86,657 in March 2015. The snapshot was taken on January 2, and any comparison of that daily figure with the March figure should be treated with caution.[9]

Name and ownership changes

NNOVER.RU is registered to LLC "ENNOVER" in 2008 and 2010,[4][5] but in 2012 it transfers to Internet company NN.RU, and its name changes along with its owner: "Nizhny Novgorod: what to buy, where to go."[6] NNTT.ORG's owner is listed as Bulldozer in 2010 and 2012, and as "Kisa Vorobyaninov" 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 row lists the address nnov.ru, the 2012 row lists nnov.org, and by March 2015 the displayed name has also changed to WWW.NNOV.ORG.

The owner field 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 one row in the top ten has no owner listed, and in 2015 there are two such rows. "Kolyuchy Sarov" by Kirill Astashov appears in the top ten three times over eight years: seventh in 2008, ninth in 2015 and 2016, each time with the same owner entry.

What this dataset can and cannot tell us

Its value lies in providing observations about regional sites captured by a single consistent methodology, where the name, address, and owner appear in the same row. It shows which projects existed at each snapshot date, how their names and owner entries changed, and in what order they ranked relative to one another.

The limitations are equally important. Only sites that had installed the counter themselves appear in the ranking: 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 suitable for comparing rows against each other but cannot be converted into real visitor counts. Eight snapshots across fourteen years, taken in different seasons, with a gap of three and a half years between June 2004 and January 2008 — such a grid cannot support claims about annual growth rates or the precise timing of any change; it can only show that the picture shifted between two snapshots. Finally, the counter was built by the company whose site holds first place in seven of the eight snapshots, and we have no independent verification of the figures.

This study was conducted by the Nizhny Novgorod Encyclopedia on August 13, 2026, based on counter.nn.ru aggregate ranking snapshots from the web archive. Data analysis and calculations were performed 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, counter.nn.ru system homepage, web archive snapshot March 1, 2000 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — counter.nn.ru, aggregate ranking, web archive snapshot September 1, 2002 (data as of 29.08.2002) (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — counter.nn.ru, aggregate ranking, web archive snapshot June 19, 2004 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — counter.nn.ru, aggregate ranking, web archive snapshot January 12, 2008 (archive)
  5. web.archive.org — counter.nn.ru, aggregate ranking, web archive snapshot April 28, 2010 (archive)
  6. web.archive.org — counter.nn.ru, aggregate ranking, web archive snapshot January 6, 2012 (archive)
  7. web.archive.org — counter.nn.ru, aggregate ranking, web archive snapshot February 9, 2014 (archive)
  8. web.archive.org — counter.nn.ru, aggregate ranking, web archive snapshot March 15, 2015 (archive)
  9. web.archive.org — counter.nn.ru, aggregate ranking, web archive snapshot January 2, 2016 (archive)