Back after a blogging break that turned out to be much longer than I had planned for..
The March 17th edition of Mint has an article on online advertising in India and data on online consumer trends for Feb 2009; these contain some interesting numbers on the advertising industry and on internet usage in India.
The total advertising spend in 2008 was Rs. 20,717 crores, with online advertising accounting for Rs. 363 crores. The projected growth rates for the various advertising meidia in 2009 are 25% for online, 15% for radio, 7% for TV, 0% for print, -20% for outdoor and -5% for cinema.
India has an internet user base of 50 million with 35 million active users (as of December 2008). These include 12 million Cyber-cafe users, 10 million home-only users, 8 million office-only users, 3 million college/school users and 2 million home + office users.
The top websites in India (based on the percentage of users accessing them) Google (75%), Yahoo (65%), Orkut (40%), Rediff (28%), YouTube, MSN and Blogspot (around 22% each)
The top websites in India (based on page views) are Yahoo, Orkut, Google, Rediff, Facebook. I think this data needs to be looked at some more; Yahoo is represented by yahoo.com (2.76 billion page views) whereas Google entries include google.com (2.47b) and google.co.in (1.9b). Why doesn't Yahoo's India site (yahoo.co.in) show up in the list? Do the numbers for Google, Yahoo etc. include all their sites; for e.g. is gmail.com counted as part of google.com?
The Indian Railways online booking site (irctc.co.in) surprisingly (?) ranks within in the top ten websites (with 180 million page views); it is accessed by 12% of India's internet users.
The data on internet usage has been obtained from ViziSense, an audience measurement service. Their website (http://www.vizisense.com) has a list of the top 100 domains and a paper explaining their methodology. Their data sources are a “well-diversified panel of 12000 active internet users” and “tracker tags” that are placed on the web pages of participating publishers. Vizisense then uses statistical techniques to scale this data to obtain estimates for the entire population.
Some interesting points in the article include:
By adopting e-commerce, companies can “kill the time and distance from generation of interest by viewing the advertisement to actual purchase”
Online ads are dominated by web portals, financial services, information technology firms and automobile firms. Consumer durables are likely to increase their online advertising as many consumers are likely to use the web to research and compare products.
The popularity of cybercafes has meant that personalization features such as downloadable widgets have not taken off in India.
Nokia projects 500 million mobile phone subscribers in India by 2011, with 50 million mobile internet users, 100 million music-enabled handsets and 200 million radio-enabled handsets.
Each of these points is worth exploring further in future posts (that I hope to write soon!). For e.g.
The only time I have clicked on the ads shown with search results is when searching for information needed for a purchase decision. Is this the case for other users as well? If yes, are we likely to see an increase in the percentage of searches done for product research and also an increase in the percentage of cases where the user clicks on the search ads?
What are the implications of having a internet user base that primarily uses public machines to access the web?
Would a user listening to radio on his mobile handset be receptive to advertising delivered to the handset by the operator/manufacturer through other means? In other words, can the operator use the commercial breaks in the radio program to deliver ads he has selected (instead of having the user listen to the ads from the radio station)?
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