Just saw this article from Avnish, Matrix Partners. Avnish, I know you are around somewhere on venturewoods, so please do participate in this friendly discussion!
A followup would be unnecessary if I agreed with this statement. However, I must say that I myself do believe that the “kids hanging out” variety of social networks are premature in India. These businesses are essentially media businesses, and reach and engagement levels are the key metrics. Besides the internet penetration being low in the country, kids are not spending hours at end on the internet — the engagement levels simply arent there as yet. The only hope for these is a strong and simple mobile addon.
And now for the exciting part — some social networks will fly in India, IMHO. I believe these will be driven by specific tangible benefits, rather than being “hangouts”. I will afford a couple of examples. The first one is referral based recruitments. The Indian e-recruitment technology is 10 years old (no, there are no company wars here! I mean this across the board.) Global sites like linkedin, simplyhired, jobster and so on have demonstrated how social networking can be tied into recruiting very effectively. The Indian model is going to be different from these, and I believe there is a significant market there.
The second example that I would afford is networks for buying services (I am yet to see a good model around product ecommerce) — services are intangible, and often very fragmented. Think of hiring a printer for printing visiting cards. These selections are essentially social in nature, and I believe translating them to the web will be productive.
I am sure there are a lot more examples — social internet is waiting to be discovered in India. And like any other business, the customer is a good place to start from.
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I think pull over factor is very important
Now the important question is
if a new social networking site starts
Will it work in india?????
Alok, I totally agree with the fact that Indians don’t hang out on internet for fun as much as people in the U.S. do owing to low internet penetration. In this scenario, the social networking sites should focus on the areas for which Indians use the Internet or where it can add value to their offline activities. Job search, being one of the most important reasons for people to access Internet in India, is yet to see a strong social networking concept like Jobster or Linkedin.
Also, a sound business model apart from advertising needs to be discovered for all these me too social networks. Since advertising revenues require a massive reach and huge user base, VCs are not showing keen interest in investing in copy cat Indian social networks.
PS: I am taking a plunge at entrepreneurship with a Web 2.0 job portal which is under development and in stealth mode right now. Our focus is to make job search and hiring process more interactive. Till now, it is a bootstrapped start up but we plan to raise funds once we are out of development mode.
I would agree with a lot of you guys who are betting big on MingleBox. These guys are essentially doing a Facebook in India (i mean not absolutely original, but then compensated by the Localization factor)…they have been trying to bring all the colleges of India onto their platform, and i believe today college-goers are the ones who are spending time on social networks . They are hiring interns from colleges who can moderate (read popularize) these college communities.
Moving on to the larger discussion on ‘Social networking in India’.. i believe supply is defintely increasing at a much faster rate than demand (economics funda 😀 ). On the supply side we have MingleBox, Yaari, DesiMartini, IndyaRocks, Fropper, Yo4Ya, GoYaar, BigAdda (being launched by Reliance Entertainmnet) and hazaar others in the making along with the King ‘Orkut’.
Now if you look at the demand side..
Orkut as on today has 51,704,081 people and Indians constitute 14.69% of the demographics (Refer: http://www.orkut.com/MembersAll.aspx).
This translates into around 7.5 million Indians (HUGE right!)
Decide for yourself now…:)
I agree to the fact that India is too big a market for anyone to capture. There are lot of me too sites that clone one of the US counterparts. Only few stand out to cater to India as a primary market.
MingleBox [http://www.minglebox.com] is one such perfect made for India kind of site. It had a very steady growth so far. Lot of features have been added so far, and I am sure many more to follow. It sure has a “pull’ factor! And with recent Sequoia funding of $7M, I am sure it will have an exponential growth.
Surely social network is here to stay 🙂
I guess i am joining this discussion late. I agree that vanilla me-too social networks won’t fly in India, but one designed for India, with tangible benefits has a shot. Hell, i certainly hope so 🙂
I’m surprised Alok feels that the Indian e-recruitment model is 10 years old 🙂 – after all he was part of it…
Jokes aside, I do agree with him though – there’s a market here for a community/user generated content/c2c being leveraged for some real pain points, and that’s where the Indian market will be different. IMHO, Orkut already has the pie for a pure S/N in India.
Let’s work to build a few that solve real problems, since that’s where the fun is – trying to find a real problem that exists in India (shouldn’t be difficult to find given that we all complain so much about what’s wrong). There have to be some that can be solved by leveraging a community.