by Arun Prabhudesai 
Comscore today released statistics for top web properties in India for the month of May 08. The numbers throw up some interesting facts. For one, Google has overtaken the Numero Uno position from Yahoo that it had held since the start. Last year they were neck to neck with roughly 14.5 monthly pageviews (Yahoo slightly higher ), however Google sites saw a growth of 35% as against Yahoo’s 27% notching the top position.
It grew on the strength of several Google-owned entities, including Google Search (up 38 percent to 17.1 million visitors), social networking site Orkut (up 39 percent to 9.3 million visitors), blog platform Blogger.com (up 102 percent to 7.3 million visitors), and video site YouTube (up 131 percent to 6.3 million visitors).
The top 3 slots go to Google, Yahoo and Microsoft respectively. Rediff comes at respectable 4th place with a rise of nearly 19% over last year. The surprise inclusion was of AOL sites at 5th spot, who were not even present a year back. The AOL mail seemed to have been quite a hit with Indian audience and number of them are adopting AOL mail over Yahoo and Gmail.
July 22, 2008 Continue Reading → by Arun Prabhudesai 
In this web2.0 age we are increasingly getting used to online classified sites, however, even in today’s world, offline newspaper classifieds have more than 90% of the market share. Online ads do not generate even fraction of a response comparatively.
Here is an example, I was looking for a office for my startup here in Pune. I did post online classified ad in no less than 5 different portals. The only site that gave me couple of responses was Kijiji. Other than that, I did not receive a single response.
For lack of options, I decided to give a newspaper classified ad for my rental office requirement. Although finding the nearest place that accepts newspaper classified was a big pain, I did finally manage to get my ad published in a well circulated daily in Pune.
It sure was worth it. On the day ad appeared, I had no less than 25 responses and more options to choose from, than I needed. Essentially, three hundred rupees spent on newspaper classified was well worth it.
Today, I came across a very useful site, which could have saved me the time and effort of running around to get my classified ad published.
May 8, 2008 Continue Reading → 
