BigAdda - Hype or Happening ?
Reliance has gone on an advertising blitzkrieg for BigAdda. And if the below Alexa graph is anything to go by, the massive campaign is definitely getting BigAdda the eyeballs.
Yes, I know - Alexa is unreliable and the usual yada yada. But for want of a better, free resource I’ll stick to Alexa.
So, the site is definitely hitting huge numbers in terms of traffic and eyeballs. But how many of the visitors are actually getting converted into registered users ?
In an interview with ContentSutra, Rajesh Sawhney, President of Reliance Entertainment discussed about BigAdda and the various projections and plans for BigAdda. As part of the interview, he claims that BigAdda has a registered user base of 100,000.
I did some digging and actually found that the site has about 1000 users and not 100,000 users as Rajesh claims in the interview above. Here’s a screenshot (I didnt want to resize the image to retain the clarity):
If you view the full size image by clicking the thumbnail above, you’ll notice two things of interest towards the bottom of the image:
1) 
which indicates that there are 1000 member profiles.
2) 
Now, there are 42 pages with 24 member profiles on each page ~ which comes out to 1008 user profiles.
Either I’m missing something or some programmer screwed up his maths or Reliance is just hyping the numbers.
As part of the interview, Rajesh also says that BigAdda has about 12,000 videos. Well, if you follow the same kind of calculation above, there are 63 pages of videos with 16 videos per page.
63 * 16 = 1008 total videos (What is it with the site and the number 1008 ? )
Again a case of bad coding or over the top numbers ?
With that said, I leave it upto you to judge but would love to hear what you have to say - Is BigAdda a hype or really happening ?
Update: Several folks pinged me about this mentioning that BigAdda does have more than 1000 users..Not sure about 100,000..But definitely more than 1000. If so, the ‘View all’ or ‘Search All’ labels on the site are a big misnomer (including the videos section). If I search for users and provide all ranges, the search results should show me all the users..Not a subset (1000) of the users. I guess I should have included ‘bad usability’ into the probable suspects above.
August 14th, 2007 at 1:31 am
great job,so are bharatstudent’s claim of 1.5 mill users–a huge team with lot of data pumping will bring in such an alexa rank….
August 14th, 2007 at 3:45 am
hi ther,
nice post explaining the number of member on bigadda. but i think u misunderstood what the bottom of the page says.
It reads… ‘Displaying’ 1-24 of 1000 member profiles. If effectively means at any given point and time the site is throwing up over 1000 member profiles. They have a basic ’search’ filter on top of the page. If you use/ modify the requirement, you’ll get a different result set upto a 1000 odd profiles.
besides i did register and have been using the site over the last 2 weeks now. there are different profiles that come up if one notices carefully every 20 - 30 minutes. these are all NEW members that keep getting added reqularly.
i’m not great at puttin up explanation in numbers, but am pretty certain they have over 100000 members. and since they’re ad campaign is all over the place, there is NO reason to believe OTHERWISE.
over n aobve all this, they have soooo many vidoes and photos, one can spend the entire day watchin em… that too while u find new friends to mingle with.
so yes, i feel bigadda is quite happening, YES.
CHEERS to BIGADDA!!!
August 14th, 2007 at 4:55 am
I think the write would know much better than this - none of these sites want to display how many users they have, to pin point accuracy. That is the reason probably you see 1000 profiles, and if i am not wrong, it will stay like that in the future also. None of these social networking sites show the exact numbers. I wonder what the actual registrations would be? Why are they not transparent about it, oh yes they are - 100,000 !!!
August 14th, 2007 at 5:44 am
Hi Pranav,
Firstly! Awesome post! Should accept you have been doing some work on this.
But i’m not sure they would agree with you. I think its fine to show up “over” 1000 results as the count while having over 100,000 profiles for the search results.
If i am looking for a person say “x” and it shows up as a 100,000, would i want to go through all the pages and look for “X”? nah
Also, the number of pages being 42.. i think the afore mentioned explanation would hold good for that too.
If you want all the numbers showed up, may be you should let them know by feed back, see if it works.
I’m sure they have that many users, you should try scrolling beyond the 42′nd page
I have been on the site for sometime now, and completely love it. I see new people joining all the time and the videos and photos are pretty cool too.
You should probably check it out!
August 14th, 2007 at 6:41 am
Hi Pranav;
Nice Post indeed.I guess Indian web entreprneurs have decided to go with mass maketing for indina users as most of India are “utility” users with most of them using net for mail,chat and info search (and porno :)).To get attention from these users they are using traditional mass media marketing.
And yes this strategy is working to bring users to their sites.My assumption is that most of users are first timers on SNs as existing user are slow movers.
Will these users wil stick to these advertisers.We all know product these advertisers permoting are not “best”.Amy be fisrt time users stay for a while but once they get aware about the other better product their will be change of loyalties.
Postive point here is all this mass marketing will create mass marketing of “web 2.0″ and will attract new users on sites which will help all net entreprenuers.
August 23rd, 2007 at 3:30 am
Check out a Web 2.0 social networking site focused on India, that has:
* Invitations for personal events
* PhotoSharing
* Video Uploading sharing
Nice and a clean interface.
Usha
August 27th, 2007 at 7:12 am
A search query for ‘Pranav’ on orkut would throw up 1000 results…..that doesn’t mean they have only 1000 pranav’s registered there.
I guess they should have included : Displaying 1-24 of over 1000 results.
Anyways check out this post….
Reasons why BigAdda’s marketing campaign sucks.
http://www.watblog.com/?content=detail&id=1023