February 18th, 2009
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According to a Comscore report on social networking sites in India, visits to the site category increased 51 percent from the previous year to more than 19 million visitors in December 2008.
Orkut is still a strong #1 with 12.8 million visitors and a 81% growth over December 2007. Facebook is far behind with 4.0 million visitors, in spite of its impressive 150% growth. BharatStudent is a surprising #3 with 3.3 million visitors and a 88% growth.
Other international social networking sites Hi5, MySpace and LinkedIn also did well at #4, #6 and #7 with 2.0 million, 0.7 million and 0.5 million visitors and growths of 182%, 110% and 71% respectively.
The Indian social networking websites Ibibo and BigAdda, however, didn’t do well and fell down by 50% and 25% to 1.0 million and 0.4 million visitors respectively.
I’ll look at the Comscore data with suspicion because it excludes traffic from cyber cafes, an important venue for internet access in India. Read More
February 18th, 2009 |
Posted in Default
| Tagged with BharatStudent, BigAdda, Comscore, Default, Facebook, Ibibo, India, LinkedIn, MySpace, Orkut, Social Networking Sites |
January 4th, 2009
Rajiv Dingra at WATBlog has a great recap of the social networking space in India in 2008.
The highlight, for me, is the war for the #1 spot between Facebook and Orkut. Orkut introduced the OpenSocial applications platform and replicated several Facebook features, offered themes, and provided regional language and mobile support. Facebook also added key features like chat that are likely to become popular in India. As I showed in my analysis of search trends for social networking sites in India, interest in Orkut is stagnant, while interest in Facebook is growing, even though the gap between the two is still significant.
The other social networking sites in India positioned themselves on content, instead of social networking features. BigAdda and Ibibo focused on entertainment and positioned themselves as quasi blogging platforms by getting celebrities like Amitabh Bachchan and Ravi Shastri to blog for them. However, as I showed in my analysis of search trends for blogging platforms in India, unlike blogging platforms like Wordpress and Blogger/ Blogspot, which have shown slow but consistent growth, the interest in Ibibo and BigAdda has fluctuated significantly, probably based on whether they were running big ad campaigns at the time. Read More
January 4th, 2009 |
Posted in Default
| Tagged with Amitabh Bachchan, BharatStudent, BigAdda, Default, DesiMartini, Facebook, Ibibo, India, MingleBox, MySpace, OpenSocial, Orkut, Rajiv-Dingra, Ravi Shastri, Social-Networking, WATBlog, Yaari |
March 12th, 2008
Quick Summary: To build an identity and a broad Indian user base for themselves, Indian social networking sites need to reflect the unique nature of relationships in the Indian society.
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According to a recent cover story in the Outlook Magazine, there are almost 10 mn users of social networking sites in India. Orkut has 7.1 mn users, Facebook 1.6 mn, BharatStudent 1.7mn, Fropper 1.0 mn, BigAdda 1.4 mn, Minglebox 0.6 mn, adding up to 13.4 mn (tweet). Add smaller social networks, factor in duplication across social networks, and the total user base for social networks in India may be ~10 mn (tweet).
As the number of Internet users in India is estimated at between 20 mn and 30 mn by most sources, at least one third of all Internet users in India now use a social network. Read More
March 12th, 2008 |
Posted in Default
| Tagged with BabaJob, Bharat Matrimony, BharatStudent, BigAdda, Default, Facebook, IDC Web Value Matrix, India, JeevanSaathi, Like, LinkedIn, MingleBox, MySpace, Orkut, Outlook Cover Story, Shaadi, SlideShare, Social Media, Social Network, Social-Networking, Social-Networks, Sumitr |
