I had bumped across this article in Foreign policy that mentioned the scarcity of bloggers India. I was really perplexed on reading that ! There are only 1.2 million bloggers in India, out of total 42 million Internet users. That means only 5 bloggers in 200 Internet users. That is shame, especially because the current generation of Indians do no leave any corners unturned when it comes to voicing their opinion. You can witness this by looking at sometimes aggressive and
sometimes colorful comments by Indians on many blogs.
One of the India based blog hosting company has even gone to an extent of offering cash prizes for people to blog regularly, Now that is ridiculous. But maybe it works.
The surprising factor here is also that most of the more than 80% (approx 34 Million) of Internet users know what is blogging and have checked blogs some time or the other. Surprisingly there are many Indian related Social Bookmarking and News aggregator sites like Digg, that have sprung up in last couple of years,I know atleast 8-10 offhand – Indianpad, Ekjut, bestofIndya, Gyanin, Indiagram, Indianbytes, humdigg, IndiaInteracts, putvote, Indiagram…phew…there must be atleast 20 more. All of them very similar to what Digg is.These sites are normally driven by bloggers, and this is one of the reasons that growth of such sites has been very slow, the other being the lack of uniqueness. I guess Indianpad is the only site that gets some amount of traffic.
I should add here that I am not too sure of numbers here, If someone has come across more authentic numbers, research or surveys, let me know and I will add it here.
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Author: Arun Prabhudesai
Arun Prabhudesai is founder / chief editor at trak.in. He jumped the Entrepreneurship bandwagon in early 2008 after a long 13 year stint in I.T Industry. You can follow him on twitter @trakin or get in touch with him at admin-at-trak-dot-in or 91.9822575676.Related posts:
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Well, not all Indians are not shy… at least not some corporate bloggers like me.. ;-) … but you do have a point; it will be good to see the variety of views emerging in the blogsphere.
Thanks for your comment Mohan.
Yes…I am equally curious about what blogosphere thinks on this subject. I am planning to put up a poll shortly on same subject.
A major factor here is that a lot of people aren’t that comfortable with English when it comes to professionally writing. And unless you write well you wouldn’t want people to read about you and your thoughts. But eventually based on sheer numbers strength we’re likely to see more and more people get there!
Youre right about traffic. Indianpad gets about 25k visitors per day (6k on alexa last week) -according to their own figures. The number two site is ekjut.com which is at about 5k visitors (125k on alexa last week) and perhaps because of their stylish approach have gotten much higher traffic than older players in a very short time.
Gyanin, Indiagram, Indianbytes, humdigg and the others were all ranked 300k or worse in alexa for last week.
Blogging in india is looked at very cautiously. Even i was very aprehensive to whole concept of blogging initially
Check out these links below they have a detailed break up of bloggers in india and links are basically a research on blogging in India.
http://www.watblog.com/?content=detail&id=628
http://www.watblog.com/?content=detail&id=681
http://www.watblog.com/?content=detail&id=710
Cheers:)
Thanks Mesmerized for the links.
I went through the links you have given me, and I should say they are pretty good research reports. It must have taken a lot of work. However, I doubt numbers put forth in the report. I am from Pune, and I know at least 7-8 wordpress bloggers there….Where as the report shows total 28 WP bloggers…does that mean I myself know more than 25% of the bloggers in Pune. Although report is indicative, it does not make much sense to look at the figures in complete truth.
However, Kudos to the WATblog team to come out with such a report…
Indians have to be more productive for now to catch up with rich east and west. Leave the recreational activity of blogging for now. Personal relationships and socialization is healthier and safer than blogosphere socialization.
Good
Indian bloggers are really not only shyee but also they are hesitating to write something properly. One thing we will have to keep in mind that what percentage of people are working in net too. In India most of the area covered in Rural & Semi Urban sector. Most of the places still yet to get proper infrastructure. So many area still do not have the internet facilities. Then No question of blogging will be there. People from the Metros are using internet facility,that to percentage of the people will be very very less. Let us wait for another ten years. We will find atleast 90% BLOGGERS from INDIA only.
can you tell me which sites pay more for Indian bloggers?