Erick@Techcrunch had an interesting post – The Internet from a global perspective. While US had the maximum number of Internet users (161.6 million), China was catching up fast (96 million).
With a user base of 25.2 million users, India came in at the 8th position. We (me included) keep whining about how Internet penetration in India is still negligible, but if you look at it from a global perspective, even with the pitiful penetration, we managed to come in at number 8. If the penetration increases by only 10% this year (wishful thinking), we’ll very easily jump two places in this list.
If you see the above penetration in terms of percentage of population, the table looks like below:
US – 53 %
china – 7.2 %
japan – 42.3%
germany – 40%
uk – 53.3%
france – 43.2%
south korea – 53%
India – 2.23%
And you can see exactly why China and India offer such a huge room for growth. The world’s most populous nations and the Internet penetration is still in single digits. Thanks to the forward looking communist regime, China is making tremendous progress in the Internet front (disregarding the online censorship, ‘great firewall’ etc.). Sadly, such aggressive efforts are still missing in India. The Indian Government’s initiative last year – “2007 – year of the broadband” was a big disappointment. Subscriber base grew at a much slower rate than projected. We need to act & act fast.
Another interesting slide from the TC post was how home grown players in several countries are more popular than the Internet biggies.
Of course, the common thread is that all of the above are non-English speaking countries.
For the Indian market I’d say that the top 3 would be Yahoo India, Rediff and Google (all Google network sites included). In fact, a similar trend has also been observed in the Indian Web 2.0 market – global Web 2.0 companies have captured more Indian users than home grown players.I guess majority of the current, online Indian population is English speaking and that explains why they’ve latched on to the Western Internet portals.
As more non English speaking Indian users come online, do you think it will tip the usage in favor of home grown sites like Guruji and OneIndia ?
Excellent review. I think there is plenty of growth for content in local languages, but rediff may not be the winner. I expect a sort of micro-localization to occur, in which the winners will be local companies run by people who have a deeper understanding of the local culture and expectations.
It will be interesting to see what really happens.
India has sheer numbers
but if quality and speed of connections were even given small weightage India would have completely vanished from any stats…
so pathetic are our broadband connections
Anyway, I don’t often see a lot of good coming out of the internet usage that is being done. People can use something like orkut for good, but all they do is put up their rock star-like photos and have found another forum for gossiping.
excellent review – i feel india is at an advantage right now cause it has very less broadband users compared to other big nations. this proves there is a huge potential to grow and even with this less numbers we are rocking the internet space. imagine what it would be when broadband and wireless access is easily available in india?
@jagannath – I agree..this report doesnt include the speed / quality of the connections. If so, Japan and S Korea would be topping the charts..
and India might not have appeared in the list at all.
@cyril – you present an interesting perspective — my question is — will the Internet penetration ever drill down to those levels ?
@dDude – yes..there is immense room for growth.