Top Russian-Speaking Travel Bloggers on YouTube

We go on perfecting our list of travel bloggers. In our previous articles 10 Inspiring Travel Blogs of Enthusiastic Travellers from Russia and Ideas for Travel Content Marketing: What Attracts Russian Travellers, we began telling about travel blogs that can be found in general when floating around the Russian Internet.

For your convenience, we decided to make our lists of most popular travel bloggers in the context of various platforms. So, we are going to start from YouTube video bloggers. It should be immediately noted that we will be updating this list from time to time, so do not forget to add the link to your bookmarks.

Anton Ptushkin (1.91 million subscribers +170 thousand per last month)

Our rating is opened by Anton Ptushkin, a popular ex host of Oryol i Reshka, and his author YouTube channel with 1.91 million subscribers. It is no surprise that the channel began heating up right at the time when Anton was working as TV host, and most of his videos about travels were uploaded at that very time. However, in 2019 Anton also uploads one video a month, and views of every new one arrive at several million times.

Anton travels across the world and professionally tells about peculiarities of every region. Marvelous shooting, excellent job of the host (his charm and humor), and a skillfully made script of every video let viewers indulge in the countries viewed and watch the video in a single burst.

Alexander Kondrashov (1.47 million subscribers +10 thousand)

This is one more wonderful example of a high-quality video blog about travelling with a professional approach: shooting is made by a whole team. Although the channel also has some videos which titles mention an opportunity to travel without money, the authors still fibbed a little as all channel videos tell about travels of people who really can afford it.

In addition to the above, the blogger’s team is quite active and uploads video 1-2 times a week. Every video gets 200 thousand views and above.

Hochu Domoi (I Want Back Home) (497 thousand subscribers +15 thousand)

Or ‘Journeys You’ll Never Go On’. This is a channel of a Belorussian journalist Leonid Pashkovskiy about travels that started from a non-typical route for a common tourist: Pakistan, Iran etc. For his storylines, Leonid would choose dangerous countries where people often have to survive. Later on, the geographical spread of his travels grew, and now on his channel you can watch video about various corners of the world where Leonid tells about the unadulterated life of local people.

Videos appear on his channel 1-2 times a month and get from 100 thousand to several millions of views. The most popular video on the channel (as of December 2019) got more than 4 million views, 157 thousand likes, and more than 10 thousand comments.

Poehavshii* (464 thousand subscribers +30 thousand)

This is a channel of a traveller Misha (Mikhail) Ronkainen who is notable for his sincerity and life conditions in different countries that are down to earth to the full. One of the videos on his channel starts from words ‘This video contains images of real life. They can shock you’—how can one not watch the video till the end after that?! The list of cities and countries that Mikhail has already visited includes Yemen, DPRK, Afghanistan, Donetsk, Luhansk, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Somali, Sudan, Libya, Antarctica, Laos, Mongolia etc.

Videos are uploaded 3 times a month on average. At that, the number of views varies from 50K to 100K per video. In general, Mikhail tells about life conditions of ordinary people in different parts of the world; however, he devoted one of his latest video to how millionaires travel.

* This is a Russian word play. The meaning of the word is 1) ‘one who went somewhere’, 2) dippy, goofy. – Ed. note.

Andrey Burenok (306 thousand subscribers +19 thousand)

This is a channel of TripMyDream.com CEO Andrey Burenok. On his channel, Andrey shares his life in travels with viewers, as well as tells how not only to go on a tour to one or another country, but also to move there for life—some videos include interviews with expatriates who moved to another country.

New videos are uploaded 3-5 times a month and get from several dozens to several hundreds of thousands of views.

Svoim Xodom – Vitalik and Liza (250 thousand subscribers +14 thousand)

We have already mentioned this blog in our article 10 Inspiring Travel Blogs of Enthusiastic Travellers from Russia as one of inspiring examples of how to create Russian-language content about travels. And we could not pass it by in our top rating as the channel is developing and has almost doubled within half a year (from 145 thousand subscribers in May to 250 thousand in December 2019).

In their blog, the young couple shares their impressions of independent travels across different countries of the world in a juicy and colorful manner. Videos are uploaded every week. The number of views is 100-150K on average, but there are also more popular videos; so, a video about a recent trip to Egypt got 278 thousand views.

Petenka Planetka (173 thousand subscribers +12 thousand)

This is one more channel of a non-typical traveller where Petr Lovygin shares his impressions of trips to mostly ‘non-tourist’ regions of the world. Videos are uploaded once a week on average. They are quite popular and have a good reach of 80 thousand views and more on average.

Sergey Dolya (127 thousand subscribers +4 thousand)

Sergey Dolya is one of the most popular Russian-speaking travels bloggers in the Russian Internet. LJ used to be his main platform, but he has also been actively developing his YouTube channel during last several years. Videos are uploaded three times a month on average, but the number of their views is relatively low (nearly 10 thousand). It might be caused by the fact that users are still used to following his travels on a different website.

Activer 2.0 (92,6 thousand subscriber)

On his channel, Mark tells how to get to foreign countries from Vladivostok on your own. What is more, his simple manner of the blog and stories about impressions during the trips resonates with the subscribers, which is clearly seen in the comments and like/dislike ratio. So, one of his latest videos about his travel by an old Soviet bike across China got 2.7 thousand likes and only 20 dislikes (with 19.2 thousand video views).

Blog Puteshestvennika (Traveller’s Blog) (56.2 thousand subscribers +5 thousand)

Sergey prefers travelling across warm countries (as most Russians, by the way). In his video, the traveller shares his life hacks, tells about landmarks and routes in first person. The shooting is as simple and down-to-earth as possible—and this may be the secret of the growing popularity of his blog. Although this video blog is the last one in our Top 10 vloggers, it is on par with the others: on average, his videos get 10-30 thousand views while the total number of subscribers is 50 thousand. So, we will be definitely following its development.

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