As per alexa, China top 50 sites has only three global companies in there – Google, Yahoo, MSN/Live/MS – rest all seem to be Chinese companies. By contrast, India top 50 includes Google/Orkut, Yahoo, MSN/Live/MS as well as sites like youtube, blogger, rapidshare, wikipedia, tom(!), megaupload, monsterindia, xboard, facebook, screensavers, ebay, starware, digitalpoint, imdb, flickr, hi5, imagevenue, uusee(!) and wordpress.
Why is it that the Indian landscape has allowed for far fewer categories to be led by Indian businesses? One clear reason seems to be that english is the dominant language being used on the internet – even as local languages begin to grow, this balance is unlikely to tip in next few years.
The other interesting part is that all web 2.0 oriented sites (italicized in above list) are global sites – the fact they are making it to top sites means that usage is there. Is it that we are overlooking the opportunity around web 2.0? or, just looking at it too late? is our better connectivity into the global community driving this (in which case, perhaps Indian entrepreneurs should look to embrace this phenomenon.) Or, are we beginning to lag behind on “state of the art” on the internet, in terms of web 2.0 pieces of technology, and in terms of imbibing the consumer-involvement model of web 2.0 businesses? I have long felt that the quality of user experience on most Indian sites falls short of global standards. Falling behind on the UI expertise, technology and business models that lead internet growth globally can have a serious impact on future entrepreneurial potential of this space in India.
what do people think?
- Promoters or Entrepreneurs – A choice for Private Equity players - August 3, 2019
- Startup Marathon Mindset - March 25, 2019
- What’s your Customer Culture? - March 4, 2019
To me the answer is simple. It’s so simple that I am surprised why others are not seeing it.
Quality is the issue.
Let’s see. Some of the flagship Indian sites:
1) Rediff: No support for firefox. UI is highly confusing at the least and horrible at the worst. The integration of the various services in Rediff itself is a mish-mash. Annoying pop-ups. Borken RSS feeds.
2) Naukri.com: No support for firefox. Last time I used around 9 months ago it loook me 35 minutes to enter a simple post. At that time if I select minimum salary to Rs 30,000 then the max limit can only be Rs 45,000. That’s ridiculous. Once you have entered two email addresses there was no way to switch one out for another.
3) TimesofIndia: Horrible pop-ups. Forget the support for Firefox it would not even support IE very well. Broken javascript all over the place. Soft porn. I had to be careful before opening up the site at office.
I must add that I stopped visiting all these sites more than six months ago. They might have improved since then but I highly doubt it.
Let’s face it and accept it. The quality sucks. It will change in due course but by that time world would have moved ahead and we would end up playing catch-up game in this field too.
How many Indians who can make such innovations remain in India ?
Maybe this is one of the reasons for this problem.
I think its also a moot point as to why some of such innovations are not happening in India before they happen elsewhere… Then the whole english-speaking world can be our market.
Several reasons I think:
* Indians trust big American brands like Google and Yahoo much more than a startup. Orkut is popular mainly because of the Google brand because in terms of features there’s nothing great about Orkut and neither did Orkut do any extensive marketing in India but it caught on because it is a Google product. But this is more of a chicken and egg problem I think – if there’s atleast one awesome web2.0 startup from India, people’s impression will change very quickly. Most of Rediff.com, sify.com websites just suck and are not on par with the Valley-born websites.
* We need more sophisticated internet cafes in Indian cities to give the rest of the Indian families a taste of broadband. Most of Indian cafes have sub-standard PCs with really slow connections, and lots of other problems. If you go to China or Korea especially, the infrastructure in an internet cafe is much better than lets say an average home. I left India 4 years back but even now whenever I go back to Bangalore or Chennai, I still have to go to a really poorly maintained place to access the net which sometimes even has monitors running at 800×640! (yes I know Sify iWay and Reliance Webworld exist but they sucked too the last time I checked!).
* What’s also interesting is why MMORPGs aren’t popular among Indian kids? The way I see it, most of the Chinese kids’ first encounter with a fast internet connection and a fast PC happens because of a game.
The other way to look at this is that Indians adopt international products / sites faster than the chinese. This is because of English, our relatively more international mindset, and our “adaptive” culture (especially among urban youth).
Web 2.0 products have network effects where critical mass adoption leads to stickiness for the whole community, but apart from them, local online products, if they are top-notch in usability, speed, or content in their domain will definitely be adopted by Indians. It is indeed unfortunate and true that the most popular sites in India like rediff, naukri, shaadi etc. have been far behind their international counterparts in all those factors, but since there was no alternative for Indians, they remained ahead of the rest. Now, times are changing, and competition is creeping into most horizontals/verticals both locally and from abroad.
My guess is that in 2-3 years we will see if the traditional, web 1.0 companies are able to reinvent themselves to compete with the web 2.0 startups, and whether the users see and perceive the difference and start a shift towards newer, cooler products, or stick to the old products just because of critical mass usage.
I still feel that without a sustainable, large enough online advertising market domestically, web 2.0 sites relying on ads as the only bizmodel will have a tough time, even if they are the coolest in their category.