This year we asked you the question, whether Indian search engines could ever tackle the Google threat? Statistically speaking the local search engines have hardly given Google a fight this year. And that’s pretty inevitable until we realize what the core business model of each of the various engines is.
Search alone as an activity is not confined to the online space in India. Hence, while the reports gave us an idea of the emerging players in the industry, it did not necessarily mean one company was bigger than another due to the higher market share. So now lets take a look at how it all took place this year for local search engines in India.
GETIT Infoservices, a producer of yellow pages and directories in India raised Rs 20 crores in funding from Helion Ventures earlier this year. Being an offline company GETIT started spreading its wings then while one could still compare it with JustDial who was then funded by Saif Partners. To draw attention of JustDial’s already existing audience was quite a task for which they would have to drive online submissions in a big way.
Soon after that, Sulekha.com was found facing a fall in ad revenues for making classifieds paid. Companies like Sulekha were already finding it tough to bargain for higher ad rates with their advertisers due to the increased competition in the classified space and being just a classified site also plays with the quality of users visiting the site. The company set a target for themselves to earn Rs 1 crore as user fee in the first year and take it up to Rs 40-50 crore in about 4 years.
Meanwhile with entrance of new players in the industry, emerged another local search engine in the classifieds space, Khojle.in. From the house of Dainik Jagran it is a part of J9 ventures. Traditional media houses setting up such online portals was quite a sight as money is still being poured into Local Search and Classifieds. Khoj.com being in the business way before Google glorified might have inspired Khojle.in but many didn’t like the sound of the latter!
The struggle to be ‘the’ search engine of India continued as Guruji.com saw a steep rise their in search traffic. Although it had the ‘G’ factor from the likes of other internationally accepted search engines, Guruji was still finding ways to strengthen their ad revenue. Guruji’s focus on providing movie timings, local search (YellowPages) and music search is certainly bringing in traffic. But could also be hurting their PPC revenues due to less dependency of advertisers on Guruji’s search traffic and the objective moving to listening to music which lowers click through rates on ads.
Baidu, China’s leading search engine became the second largest search engine and there were doubts if Indian players had the similar ability. Baidu then had a share to the tune of 6.9% of global searches according to Comscore data. On many counts though they wouldn’t be bothered at least considering Baidu has a targeted niche and it probably can never compete against a stronger Yahoo/MSN and Google globally.
And Baidu is trying to extend its search dominance on mobile phones, an area where Google has done well in China, thanks to a search deal with China Mobile, the nation’s largest carrier. In October Baidu announced a deal to provide mobile search to customers of China Unicom‘s (CHU) 3G services, and it also is testing a mobile app that features Baidu’s some most popular online tools, including a message board service.
Meanwhile another emerging search engine joined hands with HT, AskLaila.com. The tie-up was meant to form a co-branded city information microsite which will enable users to search for local services and event information across 12 Indian cities. This page also has an option that takes you directly to HT’s homepage, while he/she can also set HT as his homepage by just clicking on the tab on the top left hand corner.
When we spoke to ClickIndia‘s CEO Pankaj Agarwal in an exclusive interview with him, he briefed us about their key focus areas. With a team of 5 people ClickIndia is focused on maximizing returns to the users, which in their case is responses per ad posted. Online classifieds is a Rs 800 crore business in India. We have seen many successful vertical players ( jobs, matrimony and real estate ). Horizontal space has players like Sulekha, Quikr, Craigslist, Olx, ClickIndia and Click.in. Rediff LocalAds is also a noticable website providing free classifieds with “talk now facility”.
Quikr were then garnering around 1.16 Million unique visitors a month and pageviews equivalent to 11.8 Million a month whereas its major competitor Clickindia was at 2.8Million unique visitors per month. It offers services for 18 cities and is increasing the service net every few months. Despite its presence in many tier-2 cities, major traffic seems to be flowing only from metro and urban towns.
WATBlog also spoke to Quikr’s new CEO Pranay Chulet, he shared with us their strategy for this year. Thier strategy wass to build a network of local community based websites across the country, and to be in over 50 of the top Indian cities. They believed that growth would come for Quikr from both metros and the smaller cities, with the network effect kicking in for each new city in a short amount of time after they launched in it. They didn’t want to ignore the potential of the smaller cities – as they might be individually smaller than the metros, but in aggregate, they offer an opportunity of a staggering magnitude. Have they achieved all that they aimed at?
The online classified market is growing at rapid fast speed. Companies like Quikr, Clickindia, OLX are seen making strong headways into the market with many service additions and funding updates in past. The market would still take few more years to proliferate and become highly profitable as paid options may not work that well in India at least for Online classifieds. The future competition from social networking giants in domestic market can also dilute market share for Sole classified portals. So let’s just wait and watch their progress in 2010.
