[Amazingly interesting post by Naman - he breaks down the traffic details of In.com and has some very cool findings to share. Please note that this post is not meant to demean any product, but to understand the importance of a kickass domain name (and the serendipity traffic!)]
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Whats in the name? Traffic! Unsolicited traffic!
Well those believing over the success of in.com and thinking that in.com really deserves Alexa rank of 25 (India), need to rethink.
Go to the whois link of in.com, check out the sub-domains section and you will find out for yourself (click on the image for a better view)
Only 19% of the total reach of in.com is actually of the domain in.com.
The rest 81% is “mislead” traffic – that comes in from all sorts of .in domains like gov.in, nic.in, co.in, ac.in, airtel.in, aol.in etc.
How does this happen? Well those using IE must have noticed that when the internet speed is slow or when in other cases if IP address is not resolved, due to congestion or a misspelled domain name, IE automatically goes on to search the domain by suffixing .com, .org, .net etc. to the given domain name.
Suppose if you typed in “abc.ac.in” and if IP address of “abc.ac.in” is not resolved than IE goes on to search “abc.ac.in.com”. And hence lands at on in.com. You can notice the in.com’s redirect link in the address bar in such a case.
in.com has only 3 major sub-domains and these are not the ones mentioned in the who.is data, they are stat.in.com(analytics, probably), BigBoss2 and MTVYouthIcon.
Of course there is no doubt that the content of in.com is useful, that is why the page views is high and 65% of the page views come from the main domain.
But we need to realise that Alexa rank considers high weightage for reach of a domain in ranking it, than the pageviews.(i dont have a proof for this but one can easily notice if you follow Alexa very closely). Hence the rank of in.com has much to do with its name and IE’s functioning than anything else. Most Indian users are using IE as it comes free with windows. And also the internet speed isn’t really good for the Aam Junta.
So until IE does change its functionality, in.com will be enjoying better ranks.
Disclosure: I may be wrong in my discovery. If so, please provide an explanation to the who.is sub-domain data for in.com. Please leave your thoughts in the comments section.
Thank you Ashish for providing a platform and publishing the article.
Ashish , Thanks for the input ..
I never thought bout it .. i was always thinking that they were getting hits only from network site like Moneycontrol.com etc. and also i m wondering how effective is there the TVC..
Any idea.. wether TVC can really help getting traffic..
First of going by this theory, in.com would have been at this level of traffic for years…. this is not the case, the surge has happened only after the site has gone to public beta.
Secondly the redirect chart you see is historical and applies for a timeframe before the site went live… the site does get redirect traffic due to the great domain But the ratio post beta is probably closer to 10 percent.
In.com is working largely thru the word of mouth buzz, tight integration with the rest of web18 sites and of-course the marketing muscle an entity like network18 brings in.
thanks for the input Rajeev. i believe your findings are right but do you think in.com knew it all the time. the data is of a larger time frame but even earlier it was enough to get in.com into top 50K (alexa rank). in.com must have went a step further and added the redirects from all possible domains.
and also, i am not sure of this but as i mentioned earlier the traffic is mostly redirected through IE and i believe most alexa participants are using FF. So even if it was there all the time alexa doesn’t have the data.
Awesome post.
Even if Naman is wrong in his analysis, very cool.
Kudos.
Hey Naman must say, HATS OFF to your findings and theory!
And hats off to strategy by in.com if your theories are right..!
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/in.com even if you look at the alexa 3 month average below direct traffic to in.com averages to 65% the redirects there account for 35 percent.. this number will further skew towards direct as you look at the last month
you are right Rajeev. The issue is not that in.com is incompetent, its just a smart move that we want to highlight.
And again the stats given by you is for pageviews(“where do people go on in.com”), which i have mentioned in the article above. What we are really debating is the reach.
i don’t find a reason why you are defending in.com’s genuine traffic when no one is doubting that part. We all know in.com is a great site and will ultimately skew the stats in favor of genuine users but as of now it has an undue advantage.
Please make don’t post anonymous comments. it questions the reason of your comment.
That’s a very interesting find.
But shouldn’t us.com and de.com have the same amount of typo traffic ?
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/us.com
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/de.com
There are very few .us domains compared to the .in domains. Fact.
So any idea how much did the domain in.com cost Network18?
That would be an interesting fact to know. I checked up older pages on archive.org and the seller listed in.com domain’s price in some millions. (archive.org used to show the old pages, but now all the robots are disallowed)
From pure here say the number is Rs 10 crores!!!!
For the record
In.com does currently get 20 percent of its traffic from redirects, yes this was a fact we realized before we acquired the domain. Are we using this to our advantage? of course we are. How often do you get a domain that has the unique distinction of virtually creating its own top level domain. BUT the surge you see in alexa or comscore is due to the fact that word of mouth, internal promotion and traffic from the web18 network has propelled it to those levels faster than we could have imagined, we all knew we had a great product but to get the response that it has got has been overwhelming, we owe a lot of it to the positive feedback and suggestions the blogger community has given in.com. To respond to Naman’s reasoning, our reach has gone up significantly since we launched in august. This is not due to redirects or else it would have been at those levels for at-least 6 – 12 months BEFORE the beta launch in August since clearly the internet space is not expanding at the rate in.com has been growing. Hope that puts the speculation to rest.
Cheers
Rishi Khiani
COO – Web18
I don’t know if Naman is right or Wrong , but I am very impressed with the Theory !!!
Well Done Naman !
I’ve noticed (and clearly everybody else has too – its quite hard to miss) that In.com is being aggressively promoted through moneycontrol.com – i.e. the in.com header and the offer of a ‘free newsletter’ from udayan in you in.com mailbox. I wonder how effective this campaign has been?
Gautam Kshatriya
gautam.kshatriya@moneyvidya.com
http://www.moneyvidya.com
This Network 18 has a very good repo with orkut till now, with exclusive communities for Tech2, MTV Roadies, MTV youth icon .etc.
But, with in.com and heavily promoting it on all medium including TV, are they going to ditch orkut?
BTW, a very fact about in.com is people register to listen music. (gaana bahut mast hai – these kind of comments I have gathered about in.com so far from people from different walks of life…)
Great post, perfect reasoning.
Has anyone noticed the similarity between their logo and that of LinkedIn?
Awesome finding !
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If you have a look at google trends,
http://google.com/trends?q=ndtv%2C+in.com&ctab=0&geo=all&date=2008-9&sort=0
I figure that they are generating some 2000 odd search queries a day on google…
Not too shabby.
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BRilliant post , i firmly believe in.com is just a random site , nothing special to be honest , the fact is that its being advertised ,i.e., people are aware of such a site where they can do stuffs which they consider as ” cool ” , you know right ? the power of advertising rules brother.
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Interesting. Must be true..
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