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9:55:12 PM    comment []  trackback []

From agencyfaqs! - I-Cube,2006 a report on Internet in India is out. The survey was conducted by IAMAI and IMRB International.

"It states that 32 per cent of the active users of the Internet in India rely on it as a primary source of information and research. In 2001, when e-mail and chat were the significant drivers of the Internet, this figure was only 20 per cent. The survey was conducted for the current fiscal amongst 16,500 households covering 65,000 individuals across 26 major metros and small towns in India, with an additional coverage of 10,000 businesses and 250 cyber cafÈ owners. The active users here are those who access the Internet at least once a month."

From the IAMAI press release

• The survey reveals that there are 37 million Internet users in India, 23 million of them active users. Ever user category is defined as someone who has used the Internet at least once

• This escalation in the number of active Internet users can be seen as a consequence of the new innovations that have taken place in the content space in recent times, in the form of online ticketing, weblogs, product information and preview sites

• 11.6 million e-mail users out of the 13.2 Million Active Internet Users in the 26 surveyed cities
• 2.4 million E-Commerce users and around 7.5 Million Chat users in the 26 cities as of March 2006
• 32% of the active internet users use search as their primary application
• The glamour of chat seems to be fading away even amongst the College Going segment, with Information search emerging as the 2nd most prominent reason for surfing Internet

Contentsutra has uploaded a couple of the charts from the report .. here's one that shows internet usage by demographics [chart from the post linked earlier] where there seems to be an inverse correlation between age and email usage:



The numbers are still small .. despite our much-touted 200 million middle class in India, only 23 million active users in India! And penetration country-wide (rural and urban) is really low at 3.2% in 2006:

Look at this for comparison - now 91 million mobile phone subscribers and 5.9 mln new mobile subscribers in India in August 2006 according to ZDNet's Research -- India has become the fastest-growing cellular market in the world, adding a net 5.9 mln cellular subscribers in August 2006, according to the Cellular Operators Association of India. The gain outstripped Chinaís increase of 5.19 mln subscribers.

I also wonder whether they've covered social media .. if free flow of information and exchange is going to be a strong part of innovation in India, social media has to be a part of it.Mohan Krishnan from IMRB says:

"There will be a change in the Internet dynamics. Applications like P2P, preview sites, streaming video and radio, as well as localisation of content, will outgrow e-mail and chat. Hence, innovative applications, making a user's experience simpler and fulfilling, will be required to sustain the growth of the number of Internet users."

Which makes me wonder ... what figures do they have about blogs and social networks if at all? Several people from the corporate world (read Ad Agencies, PR firms, even traditional FMCG companies) have asked me for statistics on blogs in India .. the fact is there really aren't any that are of any use. Some figures I have seen don't make much sense somehow.

I think its time an agency like IMRB looked at doing a large-scale survey on blogs and online social networking habits in India, and followed some of the great data generation practices employed by companies like Pew who shares reports and pdfs of questionnaires online. Why I feel its time for this is while there is much talk about blogs in India today, in corporate circles, in mainstream media - and people really are curious about this relatively new media. The sense I get is they are excited about the medium but dont understand it very well .. and few are willing to take that leap of faith without the numbers.

Some stuff that might be useful from the viewpoint of a company who is considering setting up blogs either a corporate blog, or blogs for brands, or then considering the potential to use the power of word of mouth (and pay for it :)) :

• census of blogs in India - how many are there, drop out rates, active blogs, benchmarks for defining this space for future tracking, etc
• demographics of blogs and bloggers - what demographic groups are blogging more, across states and cities, age, gender, lifestage, socio-economic status, income,
• blog habits and practices - methods of blogging, connectivity, tools and content, extent and frequency of posting to and reading blogs,
• blog ecosystems - usage data for feed readers, etc
• extent of audio-video usage - producing content and consuming content
  
• segmentation of bloggers and those on social networks - demographics/user archetypes/interests/topics
• monetization of blogs - ROI on blogging and social networking (look at this attempt to calculate return on investment - ROI on blogging - link via email from Peter)
  
• community/collaborative blogs
  

9:43:18 PM    comment []  trackback []

"A cloud does not know why it moves in just such a direction and at such a speed. It feels an impulsion...... this is the place to go now. But the sky knows the reasons and the patterns behind all clouds, and you will know too, when you lift yourself high enough to see beyond horizons"........Richard Bach [quote found at Life 2.0 in a great post called Who Are You?] [Picture credit]

10:39:48 AM    comment []  trackback []