Recap 2008: Social Networking In India
Social Networking which some may term as the big bubble of the web as besides for a few social networks like facebook, myspace and possibly bebo few others have seen that kind of even half that kind of success. The year 2008 was a year of defining one’s USP as far as social networks were concerned. This year the Indian social networks focused on a particular content/community or aspect of social networking and tried to master it. Most networks realized the importance of being focused and also tried executing the same. The large Indian social networks are bigadda, ibibo, minglebox, fropper, desimartini and recently launched itimes and rediff social. The international ones which have a large and growing userbase are orkut and facebook.
Lets have a look at the year that social networking became focused:
In this post we shall go social network by social network and recap their year..
Orkut.com – The year started for orkut with the buzz of the app developer platform to be introduced to rival that of facebook. The applications were finally introduced in April and just before that orkut also quietly introduced a mobile version of its site as well. All in all this year was a year of playing catch up for orkut as far as introduction of features was concerned the game had clearly shifted and facebook was growing phenomenally even in Indian markets after orkut had ruled the roost all through 2005-06 and most of 07 as well. A clear indication was the fact that when orkut apps turned 100 facebook already had 1 billion installations of its thousands of apps. By mid of the year orkut knew it needed to do something different and hence in mid year it introduced themes a feature that facebook hadn’t introduced but was around for ages in sites like Hi5. Orkut tried aping and in some cases innovating with new features to stay ahead of the curve it launched photo tagging, private communities, regional language transliteration, scraps via sms and even a iphone compatible site a tad to late in some cases.
All in all orkut was seen taking a beating this year at the hands of facebook though some orkut apps did very well and some still continue to do well.
Facebook.com - Facebook was more in the news for the facebook apps that companies continued to launch. Nautanki.tv launched one and so did bookmyshow. Facebook on its own kept users interest in mind first even at the cost of interactivity. It limited interactivity, added ignore all features and added social ads features as well. Facebook had become so popular that even a slight downtime was ‘news‘ as users tried to access their profiles. But one thing that wasn’t going facebook’s way was the revenue.. as this article puts it chinese social networking sites were beating facebook 4:1 in revenue numbers. To make sure that they used their funds well Facebook poached Google’s CFO as well. As the year went on facebook usage went from social networking to fighting crime as well. Seeing this high level of interactivity on its platform Facebook launched facebook chat feature for its users. Facebook continued to look at ways to please advertisers by adding features like sponsored polls, gifts and being brand friendly by banning users who created fan pages for brands they didn’t own as well as come down hard on spammers in facebook.
In the mid of the year facebook said no to google’s friendly gestures and announced its own connection for friends. With each step facebook continued to win accolades and recognitions be it in the form of its founder Mark Zuckerberg being recognized or netscape co-founder agreeing to join its board of directors. As the middle of the year passed and orkut introduced themes facebook too took a relook at its design and gave it a facelift of sorts. As the year progressed facebook had another joinee in Ex Mozilla VP who joined its ranks. By now facebook was the no.1 social network the world over and there was no doubt that it was becoming really powerful.
All in all this year was a year of balancing for facebook between what users want and what was required to add revenue in the kitty. The revenue still seems dismal compared to it traction but nonetheless users the world over are hooked onto facebook.
Bigadda.com – Bigadda started the year with the intention of monetizing the property it had created by huge media spends in 2007. As the year moved on Bigadda realised the importance of being local and added regional language messaging to its portal. We interviewed BigAdda’s then COO Siddhartha Roy who stated that this was just the beginning as far as BigAdda was concerned. And he did mean it as the highlight of the year for Bigadda was Amitabh bachchan hosting his blog on their platform who made the blog pretty controversial and always in the news. A sureshot way to attract traction to Bigadda. There were rumors that BigB was paid Big Money to blog on BigAdda. BigB’s blog was a hit and 25% of BigAdda’s traffic came from it. As the year continued BigAdda launched a mobile version and set ambitious revenue targets for next year.
Bigadda bent towards a branding via social network strategy and in the second half of the year worked on tying up with brands and movies for promotion via bigadda. As the end of the year neared Bigadda tied up with Jivox for monetizing its video inventory and also disclosed its traffic/user demographics.
All in all a year for consolidation and monetization for Bigadda. Best move was roping in amitabh bachchan to blog which made them a house hold name. There was a clear attempt at monetization through branding via bigadda but the same has yet to be realised in a big way.
Ibibo.com – At the start of the year itself we caught up with Ashish Kashyap of Ibibo and questioned him about the marketing strategy to pay bloggers for blogging on ibibo. Ibibo as we have blogged earlier has constantly followed an entertainment contest strategy to engage users and make money throughout the year. It also had several tie ups like Zee for budget show, roped in Ravi Shastri for blogging, MTV for iSuperstar and FTV for ifashion photographer. It also went the branding route and roped in brands like idea and nokia and embedded features incorporating such brands.
All in all ibibo turned out to be very focused on entertainment as a vertical and talent contests as an engagement mechanism for social networking.
Indyarocks.com – Indyarocks started the year by launching a gaming community with over 800 games. It progressed through the year by launching a mobile version of its site. Its first tie up for the year came with myntra and the next one was with FXLabs which aimed at creating the largest gaming community.
Minglebox.com – Minglebox had very little to write home about this year besides for a tie up with BITSAT and the focused repositioning on being a career and education network. This made minglebox a direct competitor with bharatstudent which has been in that space for sometime now. Even apnacircle which is sabeer bhatia’s social network seems to be catering to the same space.
Fropper.com – Fropper.com too had nothing much to write home about this year except for the ezmoney programme and the music networking feature. Fropper last year had gone through the social awareness route for engagement and it worked well for them as well. I wonder why they didn’t do much this year.
Desimartini & Yaari - Both desimartini and yaari.com were virtually non existent in 2008 with no updates or news to write home about.
New social networks – Existing portals like Yahoo and Indiatimes launched their respective social networks this year. Yahoo launched spotm and Indiatimes launched itimes.com.
All in all 2008 was a year of consolidation for social networks and most of them became focused with their strategies for engaging user but still social networking is yet to find its calling when it comes to monetization. Hopefully 2009 brings that aspect to social networking.
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Great review Rajiv. I feel Orkut is becoming the MySpace of India. Soon it will be overshadowed by Facebook because of FB’s style of innovating and the plethora of features it offers. It’s a gradual migration and that is how social networking should develop. If you suddenly find some network claiming huge numbers, it raises a lot of concerns and issues as to the authenticity of the data and level of “activity”
It’s very difficult for companies to enter the social networking scene especially because of the seed traffic required for such a site. Having 100 more features than Facebook just won’t do it because of the critical mass required – I strongly feel even having one large “unique” feature differentiating it from FB, Orkut won’t do. People will just be like, “I have 200 friends in my Orkut/Facebook network. Why start a new network in http://www.aaa.com or http://www.bbb.com? My friends will just get irritated if I send them an invite.”
BigAdda has a very good chance because of the readership of BigB’s blog receives. A niche social network can come out of it. If they can rope in Aamir, Salman and SRK to blog, then they essentially hit the right note, and Orkut and Facebook have some catching up to do and that company has a chance. I don’t want to be too harsh, but to build a social network “like” Facebook, Orkut a conventional approach (putting a register,login,friends invite, etc) has minimal chances. Adopting BigAdda like approach (or some crazy new idea) I think is the best way to go about creating a social network in a subtle fashion.
Sorry for the long “comment” Rajiv . I just got excited because I had all these thoughts and you covered SocNet today.
Abhinav
http://www.acamin.com
I’m not sure, if you all have seen this. Orkut is advertising via google adwords. check here http://www.unwireindia.com/wp-content/images/orkutad.gif
A new Social Network for Indian students by the name of SocialSynapse will be launching. http://socialsynapse.com
They are currently accepting Beta testers
Agreed social networks are popping up but not a whole of of Indian social networks offer premium content and a clutter free environment. What about the portals ? there is a trend where in portals are adding in some of the features of social networks and also are offering blogging. The problem is on most of the sites Users register and disappear , users do not fully participate to build a community.. after few uses , they realize these networks offer no privacy .. what you publish whether it be a comment, a picture is visible to everyone.. what about Rich user experience? seems like most of the Indian social networks were launched using elgg or some other social networking platform .. and customizing it quickly to go to market as quickly as possible.
Further more these sites are filled with ads , too many ads , floating banners .. you name it they have it all.Just visit any popular Indian site and you will have a good taste of it. YOYOIndia.com is a new social networking and community platform that offers a clutter free environment , rich user interface, privacy options , drag and drop assignment of users into groups and much more . It is yoyoindia team’s vision to bring to the marketplace a site which will have premium content and users who really are concerned about their privacy , are concerned about staying away from perverts/ junk posted by other members etc..
At least you will notice that yoyoindia is built from ground up , while features are limited .. we have a plan to add simple and useful features, are offering open API so users can write and submit yoyo’s , offer incentives to users to participate and build the community ..
Sign up and keep a track on YOYOIndia’s progress .. you will notice how different it is from other social networks ..
Social networking sites are the next big thing in India, but the million dollar question is when will the companies actually start earning profits?? The margins will be very low until the traffic to these sites increase.
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