Indian Internet Usage: Interesting statistics and analysis

I came across a snapshot of report ‘India Online 2007‘ released by Juxtconsult recently. The report gives details on the study carried out to understand the Internet users in India. Some of the findings that were listed really surprised me. I will have a look at the few interesting findings that were part of the snapshot published by them.

These findings are based on feedback from few thousand people from different geographies and various population sizes. I think the foot print of people surveyed is not too big, so there may be a margin of error on all India basis.

Let us analyze some of the interesting findings.

Only 37% of Indian Internet users come from Top 10 cities

This was my biggest surprise. My estimation was that 90% of Internet users come from top 10 cities. Imagine that none of the 63% Internet users are from Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi, Calcutta, Chennai, Pune, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Surat and Nagpur. I am saying this because, if I do traffic analysis for my blog, more than 97% of the readers come from these top 10 cities. This is based on approx 27,000 visits I have received from India since last month. You could argue that Blogs are read by only urban population. But that reasoning will not hold true because majority of my traffic does comes from search engine (approx. 85%), so they do not know whether it is a blog or a site. They are just searching for information.

Only 41% prefer to read English

Another surprise to me. More than half of Indian people do not like reading English when on the net. I am again not too sure of this. If that was the case, portals like Rediff, Indiatimes, Sify and hundreds of other sites would have invested in having a localized language versions. Imagine the kind of traffic growth that they would have had. I am not saying that there are people who would like to read only English, but most users would prefer that.

77% of users accessing from homes use a broadband or superior connection

I cannot really debate this number due to lack of information. But it still surprises me a lot. Till first quarter of this year broadband penetration in India was less than 10%. As of April 2007, only 2.5 million subscribers out of 30 million subscribers had broadband connections and they were mostly NOT Home users.

51% of users accessed dating / friendship sites

This is quite amazing. More than 50% users accessing dating / friendship sites. That means more than 15 million users have accessed these sites. In the same survey they have mentioned that ‘19 to 35 years age groups account for only 67% of the internet users?’. I estimate most of these age group users to be the ones accessing it. If that is true, do the maths. 15 million out of 20 million people access dating sites- A whooping 75% – How many of you access it?

I do appreciate the effort Juxtconsult has put into doing this research. However, it is of paramount importance that we look at the numbers from holistic perspective. India is an extremely diverse country and gap between rural and urban population and their habits are hugely different.

I would love to hear what readers have to say and if they agree with the analysis that I have done here. There are surely few other findings that I do not completely agree with and I plan to cover them in one of the posts in coming week.

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