After over 18 months to 2 years in operation, India centric social networking startups are lagging Global peers by a tremendous margin. [Ref – June 2009 Traffic Data for India only ]
Facebook is the undisputed leader with 9.1 m unique visitors and a whopping 800 m page views. This is the only rising graph in the past 12 months. Globally Facebook had over 150 billion page views in June-09 🙂
Placeholder for Orkut – I am not sure of its ranking since data was not made available for the same. But will be competing for the first or second place.
BharatStudent – With an attitude of do whatever – right or wrong – Spam, Adult Videos etc has managed to survive and is able to attract 2.6 m unique visitors with 18 m page views. Subsidiary of NorthGate public listed company.
ibibo – Not just pure play social networking but with other content has managed to get 1.6 m unique visitors and 19 m page views. MIH group company.
myspace – clocked 1.3 m unique visitors with 16 m page views.
Hi5 – popular in East Asia had 1.1 m unique visitors and 31 m page views in India
BigAdda – Anil Ambani’s media blitz! not performing upto expectations had 830K unique visitors and 9.1 m page views.
IndyaRocks – Indian startup surviving the Social Networking Boom has still lost considerable traffic as it has halved since Sept-2008. Recorded 760K unique visitors and 21 m page views
Yaari – clocked 390K unique visitors and 4.8 m page views. Surviving on Google’s Ad Network.
MingleBox – Peak traffic recorded in April 08 and since then has fallen to a fourth. Clocked 150K unique visitors with 2.3 m page views. Focusing now on Education, college and test prep. The status of $7mn raised ? Any info ?
ApnaCircle – Sabeer Bhatia the Hotmail guy failing to impress the Aap ke Apne… managed to get 140K unique visitors and 2.2 m page views.
DesiMartini – The intelligent sell-off by Vivek Pahwa in Nov-07, before the economy crisis deepened had just 77K unique visitors and 1 m page views. Hindustan Times paid around $10 per page view in the Buy-Out, great deal 🙂
campus18 – A$$holes have you seen a network being shutdown for refurnishing ?
Why the Disastrous performance of Indian Social Networks ?
Technology Startup – VC $$$ – Me Too attitude won’t work. Consider for example, Mr. Ambani jumping into the bandwagon with really poor talent and pocket full of cash for marketing trying to compete with Facebook. You have the results before you.
Technology and Product Engineering Matters: Why Facebook can come and rule the Indian market and why not the opposite ? Facebook’s engineering team and product managers are simply marvelous. Once you decide on a cool feature, they go to any extreme to bring unmatched user experience. Here is a latest example on how they tweak TCP & UDP for Memcache.
Innovation only survivor of Recession: By observing the traffic pattern over the past 12 months, all the Indian networking sites have taken a hit. Innovators don’t copy, they lead and hence you have to have that out of the box approach rather than the “herd mentality”.
I can go on but would like to read your thoughts, comments and critics. Some more metrics about these networks is available as Paid Report 🙂