The budget of the Internet Development Institute (IRI) for 2026 amounted to almost 26 billion rubles. Alexey Goreslavsky, CEO of IRI, noted that funding has increased almost 10 times in 5 years, and the growth is associated with the presidential program to create content on the Internet.
In 2025, IRI spent more than half of its funds on video content, 34% on the blogosphere, 9% on multi-format content, and 5% on games and software products. Goreslavsky noted successful projects: the series "Constantinople" and "Dear Willie", which attracted both adult and young audiences.
He emphasized that IRI remains one of the largest investors:
Everyone tried to follow the path of Netflix: "Let's shoot 100 series and conquer the world." But to be like Netflix, you need to have bottomless pockets. Neither we nor the market has that. If earlier all platforms said: "only we will have this product, this is our original project", then according to the results of 2025, we see that the number of series filmed in co-production has doubled. After all, the release of one original project, even a flagship one, is unlikely to cause a massive influx of users to the platform.
IRI continues to be one of the largest players. What distinguishes us from everyone else is that our budget is extremely transparent: that is, it is known how much money we have allocated, how much we will spend per year. Everyone else can maneuver: last year they invested much more, and this year, for example, much less. I am glad that we are trying to work mainly on quality. For example, the number of devices from which IRI projects are watched increased by 25% last year, and the viewing time of our projects on ABC increased by 14 minutes. The average viewing time of IRI projects per device on audiovisual platforms is 2.5 hours.
IRI is also developing children's and game projects ("Prostokvashino: Why 2", "Split", "Road of Life") and is preparing historical and modern series ("Militiaman", "Marik", "The Captain's Daughter"). The main risks for 2026 are economic, financial and difficulties with distribution in the blogosphere.
