22 October 17:24
Russians increasingly prefer one-time support for content authors to regular subscriptions. Traffic to services for accepting donations tripled in 2025, while platforms with a subscription model showed an increase of only 4%, and their use time decreased by 40%. Yota analysts came to this conclusion based on anonymized data for eight months of 2025.
The change in preferences is especially noticeable in the example of leaders. Thus, DonationAlerts, a popular service for accepting donations, has shown explosive growth – its average traffic has almost tripled since the beginning of the year. At the same time, traffic to subscription platform Boosty was down 11%, while Patreon was down 50%.
Services for accepting donations are specialized online platforms that allow content authors, primarily streamers, to monetize their broadcasts in real time by receiving voluntary donations from viewers. Platforms with a subscription model are services where authors publish exclusive content that is available to the audience on the basis of regular paid subscriptions.
This year, the popularity of donation services among residents of the Krasnoyarsk Territory has shown explosive growth – the number of users in the region has increased by 32 times. The age group of 26-35 years demonstrates the highest activity – it accounts for more than a third of all users. However, the popularity of such services is also growing among older subscribers: millennials (36-45 years old) make up 26% of the total audience, and generation X – 17%. At the same time, men use monetization services more actively than women: their share is 54% among users of donation platforms and 55% among clients of subscription services.
Subscription platforms are most actively used by people aged 26 to 45 years old – they account for 56%. Interestingly, the volume of average traffic in these age categories is also growing more than others: for users 26-35 years old it has increased almost fourfold, and for the audience 36-45 years old it has tripled. It is likely that older audiences, while remaining on subscription platforms, are beginning to use them more intensively.
Yota analysts also found that Novokuznetsk, Yoshkar-Ola, Veliky Novgorod, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky and Kaliningrad are the leaders in terms of activity in the use of subscription services. But services for accepting donations are most popular in Khimki, Orenburg, Kaluga, Yekaterinburg and Novosibirsk.
The MegaFon press service confirmed that this year donations and subscriptions to bloggers’ content are rapidly gaining popularity among Siberians. Since January, traffic on such sites has increased 8 times, with the greatest growth recorded in the summer. As analytics show, the first place in the ranking in the Siberian Federal District is occupied by the Krasnoyarsk Territory – it accounts for a quarter of the total volume of Internet traffic. This is followed by Novosibirsk (20%) and Kemerovo (18%) regions.
