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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Is there any data on what are people actually doing online? I know thats a bit tough to gather, but, that sort of a report would be good.
I am not sure how many of the people are actually buying online, at least yet.
I have a 256k connection @ home. My brother has a 2MB connection at his home. Most of my close friends (about 20 of them) have 2MB connections at their places. But none of these people have ever bought anything online. My limited survey shows that most people are using their connections for all the usual “non-commercial” things:
-> Browsing photographs
-> Browsing youtube and similar sites
-> Browsing product review sites (but most buys are done at brick+mortar stores)
-> Uploading photographs and very rarely videos for sharing with friends and family
-> Skype on sundays with friends and family
-> All the usual stuff: mail from various providers, news, checking airfares, etc
-> Once in a blue moon do I hear someone book a rail ticket online
Those with “hacker” variety kids are downloading over bittorr or similar p2p networks. But, this is purely non-monetary.
Most of my friends trade online while at work!
What is the point in all that? I don’t see too much “commercial” activity happening online from the home connections.
@Vish You slam the ‘mba mindset’ and then use a very mba-ish phrase
‘blue ocean’ to describe the market. A little doublespeak eh ?;).
Personally Im still skeptical of the viability of the internet market
and internet usage in India. In my limited view of the world, there are 2
general ways to make money online.
1> Get your customer to pay for your service
Regular mom/pop/rohit/reema are not going to pay for a “service”
online. Heck they dont even like buying stuff online. And
like @ mentioned , where is the conent ?
Small Biz/Enterprises.
I would say this group has the best prospects. There are several
services, partnerships that could be provided here and you could make
some money off it.
2> Get advertisers to pay for it.
This has goto be the most popular category right now. There is no
dearth of startups (in the US and in India) that have this as their business
model (Can’t blame them, they are all competing with google or yahoo in
one way or the other) . I give you something and get someone else to pay
for it, brilliant isnt it. And this is where the numbers game becomes really
imporant. As an advertiser, its extremely imporant to me that there are
25 million internet users. That there are x number in a particular
demographic and they spend y amount of time online.
And this is where the hype machine goes into overdrive. It is in the interests
of the industry to tout high numbers to entice ad spending.
Think the mobile market looks more promising atm.
Apologies for rambling on, havent had my coffee yet ..
Cheers
— Mayukh
Sometimes it amazes me why there is so much debate on the numbers. Smacks so much of a typical mba mindset (no offense).
Folks. This is the internet. Its a blue ocean out there. So (all entreprenuers or VCs) just go and create n grow the market.
‘nuf said.
If there are 8.5 million internet connections only, of which 2.56 million are broadband, then does the perspective change?
Some other reports:
4.2 million according to one site:
http://www.internetworldstats.com/asia/in.htm
The IMRB report that RYK mentioned (says 32 million every users, 21 million active) is at:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/24288/Online-Gaming-in-India-March-2007
RYK, perhaps you speak of Sanjiv Bikhchandani?:
http://www.iamai.in/section.php3?secid=15&press_id=1120&mon=7
“Sanjeev Bikhchandani, Founder and CEO of InfoEdge, which manages Jeevansathi.com, estimates the market size to reach 70-75 crores in 2006-2007 up from 50 last year. According to him the number of unique profiles added each year is in the region of 2 -2.5 million.”
My view:
My research in the field of my new startup, the online stock trading landscape, is a little disappointing. With about 30-40 lakh internet trading account, and a sum total of 1 crore demat accounts in the country, we are speaking of very small numbers at the moment.
Given that I believe Internet based trading is the largest volume internet based transaction in India, and given that this involves morethan 20% of the NSE’s turnover (from the NSE site) the numbers for total number of internet users at 30 or 40 million just don’t pan out. Most sites, IMHO, target a population that is either connected at home or need broadband, a market that goes down to 2-3 million in total size.
Frank opinion: This is way too small and at current growth rates will stay small for the next three years. If we are less than 10 million broadband users by 2010 each company’s business plan that says a million users in three years needs to be seriously looked at.
@Alok I think its all in the definition of relevant users. The original reports in 2004 & 2005 defined users as ever users and this was at 55M. Then in Q1 2006 IAMAI commissioned IMRB and they used a rigorous methodology and came up with ever users and monthly users, where monthly users was at 21M and around 11M weekly users. Out of this they estimated that around 5M users went beyond email.
See http://bp0.blogger.com/_wZt3wqJmfhE/RYw2fejtAjI/AAAAAAAAACQ/onALVlEWyUU/s1600-h/india+internet+users.png
Comscore subsequent to this IMRB report revised their own report.
If we have indeed gone from 5M relevant users in Q1 06 to 15M in Q3 07, then that’s huge growth. There is no fresh report to pinpoint this. Infact I suspect the reason these reports do not contain this number is because it is a bit weak. There was a report on Indian gaming tabled at IAMAI by IMRB which was released very quietly because the numbers were demoralising.