picture copyright Контекст + 2.0New statistics: at the moment, Russia contains the eighth-largest online audience worldwide. With 28,9 millions of unique users, it delivers 2,9 percent of the now 1,007 billion of individual Internet users worldwide. Or so online information provider comScore - a prominent source for statistical information on consumer behavior - claimed in a press release last week.If delivered with slightly utopian rhetoric - "surpassing one billion global users ... is a monument to the increasingly unified global community in which we live and reminds us that the world truly is becoming more flat", says the company's president Magid Abraham - the comScore survey nevertheless provides some helpful comparisons and conclusions. Did you know, for instance, that the Chinese Internet audience outranks that of the US? For those who follow digital developments this may not be a great surprise - but the comScore site is a good place to verify recent suspicions and preditions with hard facts and numbers.ERPS LJ user simmons_fan just sent us a post of his in which he explains why comScore is not the most reliable source thinkable for statistics on Russia. simmons_fan, I come at this as a relative outsider, so just out of curiosity: do you know of similar discussions about the reliability of Yandex Blogs statistics? Or do they have a solid reputation, as I have been led to believe so far? Whether you have time to look at this or not, thanks a lot for your comment. I should have known it: there exists no such thing as 'hard facts and numbers'.