Rapidshare Comes To India To Lure Users & Businesses
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For those who don’t know or have never used Rapidshare – Its a file hosting and sharing service that is popular around the globe. As per alexa India figures as the second largest traffic provider to rapidshare after China. Have a look at the traffic share below:
Now Rapidshare COO Mr. Bobby Chang is in India to promote Rapidhshare’s services. He sees great potential in the Indian market and feels that the Internet penetration in India is only going to grow thereby leading to need for services like rapidshare which can host data online for free.
On the current traffic from India he stated
“Currently, we see about 2-3 million users from India every day using RapidShare everyday. We expect to see a 10-20 per cent increase in activity this year as we launch more services”
Bobby Chang was also in India for the RapidShare Lottery which was won by a 19 year old girl named Srishti A. from New Delhi. She was presented a cheque of Euros 50,000. Over 500,000 people took part in the prize draw by exchanging RapidPoints for raffle tickets.
The Dark Side Of Rapishare
Well for those who know rapidshare will also know that its notorious for hosting all kinds of files (pirated movies, music, software, adult mms clips etc). Ofcourse all of this is user uploaded and shared and if one does complain to rapidshare they do take down a particular file but when 1000’s of such files are uploaded its very difficult for a authentic content owner or even girls whose mms clips might be on the platform to report all of them. Hence rapidshare enjoys the traffic as not all illegal content is reported. One may argue that the same is the case with an UGC platform be it orkut, youtube or even facebook. While this might be true file sharing takes it to a different level as the file itself is downloaded by the user and now can be shared. Unlike youtube videos which cannot be downloaded that easily (Yes there are services for that too but not everyone knows about them).
So Rapidshare may be looking to increase its presence in India but before it does that it may want to relook at its services as many Indian publishers would not be happy with their content being shared for free and rapidshare making money out of the same. Rapidshare could be termed as the napster of the modern world only that its not P2P sharing but file hosting.
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Yes, Rapidshare indeed has a huge market potential in India. Rapidshare has been popular globally only & only because it hosts tonnes of pirated stuff, be it games, movies, softwares and what not. You can find almost any software, game or movie that you can think of. One can easily get the links of all pirated stuff through several rapidshare search engines available on the net. Once the users get the links, they easily agree to shell out 55 euros annually in order to download all the pirated stuff from rapidshare. This is how & why rapidshare mints so much money and is so popular throughout the world. China and India top the list of the countries with the maximum rapidshare traffic due to the very fact that China and India are the top two nations with the highest amount of software piracy in the world. Rapidshare will slowly turn into a menace (much bigger than Napster), which would become impossible to stop.