Well, so how popular is blogging in India?

Let us go over some stats and facts published by some sources:

"Blogging India: A Windows Live Report", a report put together by Windows Live Spaces, as part of a pan-Asian research initiative based on an online survey of over 1,000 visitors to the MSN portal from within the country, revealed that India’s so-called nascent blogosphere actually stands out within the region.

For one, the country’s blogosphere is largely driven by youth, and by a passion for self improvement and entertainment. 42 percent blogs world-wide are read for event updates, and 49 percent for Entertainment.

Although blogging is on an upswing the blogging community is still largely nascent, with a mere 14 percent of the country’s netizens involved in active blogging while 39 percent just about aware of it.

Not surprising, young adults are fueling the blogging revolution with 54 percent bloggers aged between 25 and 34 years; 32 percent under 25 years; and 15 percent over 35 years of age.

Morever, with 90 percent bloggers spending up to 5 hours a week reading blogs or updating them, the survey hints that the Internet could soon become an inseparable part of the advertiser’s marketing mix.

Have quoted the above from an article on Techtree.com, dated November 26,2006
Similar facts also reported in an article on Rediff.com, dated November 28, 2006

We’ve kept the above in mind and largely researched the ‘Online Indian Youth’.
Also note, the above was a survey of around 1000 people.

But let us go over some more interesting numbers:

Article in Economic Times, dated July 20, 2006

(This was after the Mumbai Local train bomb blasts - when the ministry took the whole of blogspot down)

" Government sources also added that the ban on specific blogs was unlikely to be lifted and also did not rule out the possibility of it being made permanent. India has about 40,000 active bloggers, while over ten times this number is estimated to have opened a blog, but are not regular users. "

That means around 4,00,000 Indian’s have blogs?

Well keeping the above in mind, we decided to see how many people have ‘opened’ blogs. It would be safe to assume that if you have ‘opened’ a blog - you would have definitely read a couple more.

Then there was a release by Juxt Consult, which revealed:
Of the 21.4 million net users in Indian a staggering 85% (that’s roughly 18 million people) regularly check blogs.

"A heartening fact highlighted by the report is that a lot of people who check blogs do not necessarily blog themselves, surely a big respite from the general conception that the blogs mostly thrive on bloggers “scratching each others’ backs”, that only a close group of bloggers generally read each other’s blogs."
says Debashish on his blog

And then there’s the most interesting point which the report makes:
"Checking blogs has become second most preferred online activity after e-mailing."

Well on a lighter note, most of my friends have absolutely no clue as to what a blog is. Most of them also have no clue as to what web 2.0 is. Perhaps they are not net-savvy enough? But they do know whats e-mailing and orkutting!
Orkut is the 2nd most popular site in India after Yahoo and Blogger is no. 9.

Well some other interesting notes that I’ve made:

2.4% of the readers of TechCrunch (A highly popular blog about technology start-ups, particularly the Web 2.0 sector.) are from India. (source: Alexa)

A November press release by IAMAI had these figures:

so we based our research on the above mentioned 8 cities and also on a few other mentioned in an earlier report, along with a couple of random cities.

Well we used Orkut to reach out to all the bloggers and these are the observations made by us:

(No. of people = No. of people we tracked)

Top 8 cities:

Some Additional notes:

Chennai, Bangalore and Hyderabad each recorded more than 1000 users using blogspot. The coolest fact being all 1000 had been active on orkut yesterday (5th April, 2006).

The next 10 cities in India we selected to track:

Why only Blogger, WordPress and LiveJournal? Well we also included TypePad - but found only 1 user using it, in the all of 3,08,960 users we covered.
It didn’t really make much sense to include other players (But we agree, the total no. of bloggers would definitely be a little higher if you include all blogging platforms).
We asked some users on their reaction to having their blogs on upcoming social networks in India - to which the common reply was, ‘I rather blog at a site which is meant primarily for blogging’.

Well Blogger (blogspot) is the most popular blogging engine in India by far.

Some stats:

In the second rung cities: 1.9% of the total users we went through had blogs.
In the top cities (Excluding Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad): 2.7% of the total users we went through had blogs.

More inferences and data to follow at a later stage - so stay glued to WATBlog.com

To know the exact methodology used to obtain the above figures or the other data we have tabulated - send me a mail at ekalavya (at) watconsult (dot) com

We at WATConsult also undertake other such social media and youth related research, so do drop in a mail if you want something specific.

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