Infographic: State of Internet & Social Media Usage in Iran

In the recent years, a big proportion of Iranians have proved to be strong adopters of new technologies. In a series of articles we will shed light on the state of Internet usage and the major social media platforms used by Iranians.

You’ve probably heard it many times that Iranians quickly adapt with new technologies, or that despite some restrictions Iranians are heavily employing western social media networks to spread the first hand news among themselves. But unfortunately there are not that many reliable statistics and facts about this matter. For the first time, TechRasa and NazarBazaar have conducted a questionnaire to find out about the state of Internet and social media usage in Iran.

NazarBazaar which is an Iranian market research platform helps businesses define surveys and sets incentives for consumers to answer them. Up until now NazarBazaar has gathered insights for over 300 clients from 20,000 survey takers. The questionnaire and the report for this infographic is designed and published by TechRasa, and the data gathering and analysis has been done by NazarBazaar. 3707 Iranians from the age of 18 to 65 have answered our questionnaire; of which 2829 were men and 878 were women.

Main purpose of Internet usage in Iran: Searching for content

Looking at the first section of the infographic you can see the main purposes of Internet usage among Iranians. With nearly 60%, “searching for content” is the main priority for Iranians. After that “work purposes” (e.g. email, professional messaging apps, webinar and video conference) and “social media” (e.g Instagram and also considering a messaging app such as Telegram) are on the second place with almost 50%. For this questionnaire, the survey takers had the option to choose from multiple choices. What seems to be interesting among the answers is that only over 10% chose “reading blogs” as one of the reasons to use the internet. It’s worth mentioning that In 2002, Persianblog and Blogsky became the first free blog services for the Persian speaking community and the first wave of bloggers attracted many Iranians to use the Internet for this purpose. But according to a recent study by Iran Telecommunication Research Center, currently 70% of Persian content over the web is either duplicate from news websites or are absurd.

Telegram and Instagram are top priorities for Iranians 

For the second part of the survey we asked people about social media platforms and messaging apps and whether if they have registered an account on them or not. As we had predicted Telegram has the most number of registered users among our demography, with nearly 80%. According to Pavel Durov, the Russian founder of Telegram, this app has over 40 million users in Iran, more than any other country in the world.

We’ve covered the many reasons why Telegram is this much popular in Iran. You can check our articles about Telegram from these links:

1.The Impact of Telegram on Iran

2.Have Iranian Telegram Channels Really Generated $23.3M in Revenue?

3.60% of Iranians Use Telegram as an Entertainment Source

4.Why Telegram Should Move Its Servers Inside Iran

5.Telegram’s Voice Call Got Blocked by Court Order in Iran

This study also indicates that over 50% of the survey takers have an account on Instagram. Even though other social networks such as Facebook and Twitter are blocked in Iran, Instagram is available in the country and is widely being used by different age groups. Many Iranians use Instagram not only to share their moments with pictures but also to write mini blogs or spread the news. In the recent years the government implemented “smart filtering” to only block out the criminal and immoral content on this app, instead of blocking the whole platform.

WhatsApp has also shown to be the third most popular platform in our survey. Although Telegram has more features than WhatsApp, a big population of Iranians still prefer to use this app for various reasons. It’s interesting to know that the voice call feature on Telegram is blocked in Iran, while the same feature is available on WhatsApp.

Related articles:

1.Even Our President Is More Social than You!

2.Infographic: Social Media Demographics in Iran

3.The Role of Social Media on Iran’s Upcoming Presidential Elections

In the upcoming days, TechRasa and NazarBazaar will bring you exclusive insights about the state of messaging apps and social media usage in Iran.

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We Thank Adro our sponsor for this article

Adro is Iran’s first Ad exchange for programmatic ad space buying with more than 9 billion ad requests per month. Their Real-Time Bidding (RTB) platform has increasingly benefited the advertising industry by auctions that enable ad networks to sell their banner inventory in Iran’s desktop and mobile applications.

Read Iran’s first AdTech overview report from this link.