Clueless in cyberspace

Font Size

Print

Feedback

Email

Discuss

: For all the ballyhooing, the online media market in India remains in deep hibernation. Agreed, data can be misleading at times, but in the case of Indian web properties, the conclusion is clear. Today, there are over 150 million online sites in the world, catering to some one billion surfers. Of this, an estimated 100,000 content and corporate sites are run from India. None of them figures in the global top slots. According to the Web info tracker Alexa, an Amazon.com company, none is in the top 100, though local versions of international properties like Yahoo, Google and Orkut hog the limelight. And estimates suggest that over 90% of all global Internet ad revenues (estimated at $30 billion, which is a 6% share of the global ad pie for 2007) go to these 100 sites, which are mostly news services or user-generated content sites (including social networks). The top 50 sites, according to Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers , bagged about 90% of the online ad money in the second half of last year. And during this period, the top 10 sites got a staggering 70% of the money.

All others seem to be cyber-posters. Are Indian online properties really so weak? Let’s see. Out of nearly 50 million net surfers in India, an estimated 80% are young adults prone to the charms of Orkut, MySpace, YouTube, Facebook and so on, ignoring local sites such as Bigadda and ApnaCircle. Since their reading habits are poor, news sites in India do not attract and retain many. The average time spent by users on an India-centric news site is less than 10 minutes a day. Most “readers” do little other than glance at the homepage. So, that’s the trouble. A small and superficial online crowd.

But who cares? Advertisers and media companies like living in a fool’s paradise so long as there’s a dotcom attached. Big advertisers earmark a small part of their budgets for online ads without following any tangible return-on-investment rules. And as media companies’ targets are so low, they are satisfied with whatever comes their way without putting in much of an effort. Result: total online ad revenues have languished at just 4% (while print and TV get 40% each) of the country’s ad spend, now estimated at over Rs 16,000 crore.