Indian Social Networking Trends

Comscore, the Global Internet information provider recently released their report on the top social networking sites in India. 

The report throws some very interesting results. To kickoff, Facebook as expected has just stormed its way into the Indian audience with a growth rate of 150%. It had 4.044 million visitors this December. Orkut is still the leader with 12 million page views this December (an increase of 81% from last year) which suggests that though Facebook is edging up, Orkut still has the masses who will probably take time to adopt to Facebook. 

However it’s interesting to notice a slump in the page views of Ibibo.com, which has been spending massive amounts on advertising and marketing this past year. The number of visitors on Ibibo dropped by 50% over the past year. Maybe the guys down at Mothership need to rethink into how to penetrate into their target audience better. They did come up with a number of contests and tie up with various college fests to gain a market share but it doesn’t seem to be working as well as they expected. Similar results are portrayed by Big Adda which has also had a decreased traffic rate of 25%.

Hi5 on the other hand has had the highest increase in traffic with an increase of 180% over the last year. 

Linkedin too has had a steady climb with more and more Indians visiting the professional networking website. Perhaps recession has played its part in directing traffic to this website. More and more people are creating a Linkedin account many of whom are still to leave college.

Gaurav says that he doesn't take these stats too seriously since it fails to recognise the traffic that comes from Internet kiosks and PDA, and rightly so. A huge amount of internet users in India don't own a computer and use it from internet cafes, so I suppose the are a lot more numbers that have to be added to this report which may present a different picture altogether.

Extra Innings at WAT

For the last 2 years I have been actively leading a virtual life, spending a lot of my time online, trivia crunching. A lot of the info has been feaces, but in between I also managed to gain insight into a few things here and there. I have taken a particular liking to Social Media and the Web and wanted to reach out to a larger audience and that is where WATBlog comes.

I shall be blogging about Social Media, Technology and the Internet over here. Do check it out if you're into that sorta stuff.  And visit this link to see all my posts at WAT

If not, well, Whatever Things will aways be basecamp. You can chill here. 

From Digital Print to the Fine Print: Online Media hitting the stands

I can never stop talking enough about Mutiny Media. What might have at first seemed like a social experiment 5 years ago just became too big.

An amalgamation of several voices (which many a times have conflicting views amongst themselves), Mutiny.in,ventured into the print space becoming Mutiny Magazine. Obviously, its been quite a challenge but we have been just too optimistic and above all believe in citizen media. The website has been revamped recently with some new features.

What I want to say is, can social media resurrect the presumably stagnant print media. I came across this awesome experiment the other day. It's called the Printed Blog and does exactly what Mutiny was doing. They take in user generated content and publish it. They have already signed up a lot of bloggers (300 when I last heard) and have got advertisers readily accepting to associate with them. I wish them all the best and will be closely following the venture.

And ofcourse there is the inspirational story of the photoraphy magazine JPG (whose content is user generated), which is unfolding as we speak. The magazine was about to shut down had it not been for the heroic acts of the readers who found new acquirers for the 8020 Media, the media house that publishes JPG.

As everyone as been saying, this will also be a very interesting time for the publishers for obviously the credibility factor will come into play. The views will have to be backed up with facts and bloggers will have to take responsibility of what they publish. 

It's the same story as that of the indi music scene I suppose.

BTW you can download the first issue of the The Printed Blog here

To subscribe to the Print issue of Mutiny, click here