VC’s will invest in India Social Networks when they attain 40 million users!
Alok Mittal, MD, Canaan Partners, a venture capital firm, says: “When you put that in context, Indian social networking websites are in their infancy. The break-even point is longer, but once they attain a critical mass of 40 million users, then VC firms will start investing in them.”
Current Indian online population:
comScore put the current Online Indian Internet population at 22 million.
IAMAI put it at around 41 million last year and said is set to grow to a 100 million by 2007-08.
JuxtConsult puts it at 30 million (April 2007).
Current Indian Orkut Population:
15.93% of 69,378,730 (August 27, 2007)
The future?
Urban India stood around 250 million in 2006. Urban India also possesses the highest concentration of English speaking population in the world.
Ever user? Someone who has used the internet at any point in time.
Active user? An individual who has used the internet at least once in the last month.
Internet penetration in Urban India? 10%
IAMAI says: Every 10th individual in Urban India has accessed the internet.
The scope of this number rising to 40% by 2010 is definitely positive. But if we go by Alok Mittal’s figure of 40 million users in a social network, it might take more than a decade for the local social networking players to get funded.
Why?
Current Orkut Indian population = 10 million (This includes duplicate and fake profiles)
Current Indian Online population = 40 million
25% of the users online in India are using Orkut.
And while Orkut manages to get around 8 Lakh registrations from India per month, local players are still hovering around the 1-2 Lakh total users mark. 40 million is going to take time. A very very long time.
Do feel free to share other statistics which you might have come across.
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Your review made scaring for social n.wkg startups and made skeptical for growth and its also good news for those thikning to get on sns. though i liked the way you wat blogers are moving.
keep it up.
40 million !!! ok.. cool..i have 39.9999 million to go..
I would take the orkut figure with a large pinch of salt.
I have a gmail account and it creates a orkut profile for me automatically!!!!
I realized it when a mail on my gamil account that I have a message on orkut from the hinderlands of Maharashtra from a lady saying she was inspired by an article I wrote. (I am a journalist). I had never logged into orkut before that.
Could it be a fair amount of their bloated figure is people like me?
Orkut doesn't make a profile for you if you merely possess a Gmail iD. Gmail has the maximum no. of users from the United States and a pretty dismal no. of people from there.
fropper.com and minglebox.com have apparently got funded $8 million and $3 million dollars respectively with nowhere clos to even a million members. what is alok mittal talking about?
with the quality of portals in the Indian Social Networking scene dont think they combined would ever touch 40 M users . I am not sure if Alok posted this comment Canaan has invested in the SN space on a portal with less than a million users
By the way dont believe what the Management of SN portals tells you I recently heard BigAdda the biggest peice of crap in the social space mention they have over 15000 signups in a day Hogwash