A friend of mine who is the founder and CEO of a major Indian internet group estimates that in India there are 15M internet users, beyond email, who log in every week, and this is growing at about 2.5M a year. Plus add another 2M NRIs. This is the relevant Indian market for all non email applications like social networking, jobs, matrimonial, shopping, blogging, search, travel, etc.
What do you feel? Good enough or too small?
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Rehan, why do these numbers keep dropping 🙂 We heard 37 million three years back, and then those numbers came down to 20-25m couple of years back. Now just when we thought we were perhaps back to 30-35m, here we come again! Whats happening… Korde, please let me know of a decent market report you might have seen on this, thanks!
Comscore number for monthly unique visitors Aug 2007 is 24M*; for Sep 2006 it was 19M – 25% growth, albeit on a small base. Pageviews up from 22B to 32B – 42% growth. Growth in transactions would be even higher – I do know of mid sized businesses (not startups) that have grown by 100-150% in last one year. It makes me believe there is a fair bit of growth that one can drive on the underlying 25% user growth. Its going to be far more fun if the incumbent telcos can make better use of some of the copper they have!
* Comscore data excludes cybercafe users, and they estimate the total user base is around 35M monthly uniques (as against reported 24M). The percentage numbers should still hold.
“CEO of a major Indian internet group” ahem, okay.
Nobody really has a grip on the numbers, not even decent estimates and when you take out email from it, 15 million sounds deliciously suspect. That’s roughly 2 million users every day. Methinks that’s bunk.
We won’t pull in the big numbers as long as we stick to being the Indian English internet. That is a very limited market, especially for content. Of course, the penetration issue will be sorted out in the coming years, but once that is sorted out, what do we serve them, English content? It just won’t work.
If the numbers are right, it still ain’t much. We still don’t use the net to transact much and by nature we are not very participatory.
@Aseem excellent perspective: products where the family/group buying decision is made by a regular user, then the user base is suitably amplified. Such as with recruitments, or air tickets.
Will be very interesting try and estimate a demographic breakup of this usersbase to understand how many are influencers/group decision makers
@Korde, 1st of all the market reports are not very clear cut. The number of non email regular users has not been easy to locate. Hell, I don’t have a single market report in my hand that gives this out. 2ndly, this discussion is to discuss the potential with this market size.
How does this matter? And you mean to say 15M is relevant Indian market for all non email applications?
There are decent mkt reports which can get u clear picture..
Once again, a mediocre stuff…! (sorry about being so straightforwardl)
Well, depends on the demographics. If these are people who making buying decisions for themselves and their families, then that’s a good number.