Startup Dunia

IAMAI claims there are 37 million ‘ever user’ Internet users and 25 million ‘active users’ in India at end of September 2006.

JuxtConsult’s recently released ‘India Online 2007′ pegs Indian Internet user base at 30.32 million. 83% (approx 25 million) are ‘active users’. Of the 25 million ‘active users’, 20 million access the Internet every day.

active user ~ a user who logs on to the Internet at least once in 30 days.

So, if someone was looking for accurate estimates on Internet usage in India, which report is to be believed ?

The ‘ever user’ metric is crap and the ‘active user’ isnt convincing enough to me.

The TRAI report seems to be much more convincing and reliable. As per the report, there are 8.582 million Internet subscribers of which, the broadband subscriber base stands at 2.054 million.

It would be safe to assume that the 2.054 million broadband subscribers in India constitute the ‘Innovators’ and the ‘Early Adopters’ segment in the Technology adoption life cycle graph below. After all, they wouldnt be spending on a broadband connection if they werent technology enthusiasts.

I — Innovators, EA — Early Adopters, C — Chasm, P — Pragmatists (early majority), P — Pragmatists (Late majority), T — Traditionalists. For an explanation on what each of the above user base means, see here.

In an earlier post, I attempted to create a taxonomy of the Indian Internet websites. If you plot this taxonomy against the technology adoption life cycle graph, we can try to roughly estimate where exactly each class of Indian websites lie on the tech adoption life cycle graph.

The portals and the News and Infotainment sites lie in the Pragmatists (P) late majority section. E-commerce, banking sites like ICICI, Ebay etc. fall into the Early Majority section. The vertical like online matrimony, jobs, travel are on the border of the Early Majority and the Late majority section (slowly treading into the late majority section). Social networking sites like Orkut, Ibibo etc. fall into the Early Adopter section while Web 2.0 startups fall into the Innovators section.

I think blogs fall into the early adopter section. They still need to cross ‘the Chasm’ to hit some acceptable majority.

{Begin Rant}

It is in this chasm lie the current problems - people need to be educated about what blogs are, what purpose they solve. That blogs are not the end service providers. As Kamla says, the traditional media should probably play a bigger role in educating people on blogs, the power of blogs etc.

{/End Rant}
This is a rough attempt on my part - feel free to provide any input you may have. It would be great to get some varied perspectives about this.