Thanks to Gill Kelley of CIM for Tweeting about this great article from WARC about the growth of the internet and social media in India.
I was interested (but not surprised) to see that facebook has overtaken Orkut in India. Google needs Google+ to become a credible facebook competitor...
Highlights of the article pasted below, for the full article click on the link above (on "great article"):
NEW DELHI: The Indian internet population could triple in size during the next three years, according to estimates from Google, the online giant.
Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, Rajan Anandan, Google's Indian country head, predicted the country's web audience would grow from 100m users at present to 300m in 2014.
Moreover, the current internet penetration level is just 8%, suggesting considerable long term room for expansion exists, boosted by rising smartphone uptake and improving infrastructure development.
"Despite a lot of the infrastructure challenges we have as a country, 100m Indians are online, they're spending a huge amount of time online and they're doing a varied set of things online," said Anandan.
Internet advertising expenditure now stands at $200m a year in India, from a global total of $80bn, while local ecommerce sales have reached around $5bn, trailing the $80bn logged in China.
However, Google has found that 65% of web users in India who are looking to buy a car use this channel when researching potential acquisitions. "[This could] have a huge impact on advertising as well as commerce," said Anandan.
Similarly, the company reported 90% of netizens interested in making purchases from the automotive or telecoms segments regularly go online, but brand owners in these industries are lagging behind.
Anandan said: "You should actually have a digital first strategy. That's not to say you shouldn't do significant TV advertising, but for many industries digital today can not only reach the audience that's most valuable to them but also target them in a very interesting way."
Vizisense, the research firm, reported that Google's search engine has 63m users in India a month, alongside 23m users for YouTube, the video platform, and 3m users for Google+, the social network.
Orkut, another social network owned by Google, has 11.1m monthly visitors, now some way adrift of Facebook, on 42.7m.
It's quite interesting: global Vs local networking sites. I guess it varies from country to country. Looking at Russian social network Vkontakte.ru (VK.com) - it's way ahead of Facebook in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan, and I don't see Facebook overtaking it, at least in Russia with internet penetration at about 43%.
May be Facebook has to start tailoring their "product" to the audiences? Like McDonalds: they will have all the standard cheeseburgers and french fries, but will also add elements of local cuisine to their international restaurants.
Posted by: Rushana | September 22, 2011 at 02:20 PM
Absolutely Rushana
I was surprised to see their success in India, but it is harder where there is an established player that people are used to using. Although, if Facebook continue to play around with the layout and news feeds, everyone may leave!
They, like all brands, need to think about how they can make themselves relevant to different audience segments, whether that is by culture, language, geography or behaviour. They also need to listen to their customers more and stop playing around with a service that people like as it is. Perhaps they should be focusing on privacy rather than new ways to confuse with new layouts!
Posted by: Nick Baggott | September 22, 2011 at 03:02 PM
Totally agree! Everyone seems to be annoyed with the constant changes..
Well, we live in very interesting time! We'll see what happens next with Google+, etc :)
Posted by: Rushana | September 22, 2011 at 03:32 PM