State of Indian Blogosphere – Blogspot more popular than Wordpress…and more
Blogging in India has finally gone mainstream, but there are some obvious challenges when it comes to corporates embracing the platform.
BuzzGain, a DIY PR startup has tracked Indian blogosphere and has some interesting findings to share:
- Growth of blogs and bloggers in India is about 11% annually, in the last 2 years after expanding over 30% during the years 2004 to 2007.
- As expected, more urban (in large cities) bloggers than rural bloggers. The majority of bloggers in India tend to be from one of the 6 major metros, with an overwhelming 63% from cities as opposed to rural towns and villages.
Mumbai and Bangalore lead the pack at over 0.45% of Internet users being bloggers while Kolkata and Hyderabad fall to 0.24%. - Google’s Blogspot beats Wordpress, when it comes to adoption (is it because WP.com doesn’t allow ads?)
What’s interesting is that blog platforms such as Sulekha, Rediff and Blogadda do not have a significant
number of English language bloggers. MSN Live Spaces and blogs from Six Apart surprisingly also do not appear on the top of the list.
- Less than 0.05% of blogs in India are corporate blogs, compared to over 1% in other nations! – Corporates should surely read Tips for corporate blogging.
- Entertainment (Bollywood) and technology related genres make up the majority of blog content with sports (cricket) coming in at 3rd.
- The good news? Blog readership has steadily grown from about 12% of Internet users to 35%
of Internet users
I believe, lot of this has been fuelled by mainstream media coverage of bloggers as well as celebrities like BigB/Aamir Khan popularizing the concept.
- Blogs reach the young demographic with a pretty even spread among the genders, but as they get older, skew mostly men readers.
This is ofcourse, reflection of India’s Internet demography. - Why do people read blogs?
”To learn something new’ (37%) tops the chart, followed by ‘Trend Spotting‘ (25%), Catching up on niche news (25%) and Get different opinions (17%).
What’s your opinion? Will Indian blogs go beyond the present state?
Must Read: Twitter India user base
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Related posts:
- Corporate Blogging : Why do it? Few Tips and Warnings!
- Wordpress Themes for Microblogging – Build Twitter like Collaboration using Wordpress
- Of Indian Blogosphere and plagiarism
- Blogosphere – By the bloggers, Of the Bloggers and For the Bloggers.
- Rural Internet Users/State of Vernacular Content in India
About the author - Ashish Sinha is a Startup Mentor/Product Strategy Coach, and the founder/chief editor of pluGGd.in.
He has launched/managed couple of products (consumer as well as enterprise) in US and India, and now consults with startups/small businesses on their product/media strategy. He can be reached at: ashish (at) pluGGd.in [+91 98452 06443]
“(is it because WP.com doesn’t allow ads?” : Exactly.
Another thing is that BlogSpot allows only 100 invites not more than that and wordpress allows more tha 100 invites for invite only blogs.
ashish,
Were you referring to blogadda or bigadda above? wrt: blog platforms ?
Yes… I love Blogger bcoz they allow ads…
I proudly hate WordPress as they say “Proudly powered by WordPress”
Cheers
I don’t think this is inclusive of all regional languages. All it talks is about, Bollywood, cricket, AB, SRK. If you really capture all blogging effort from India(not English and Hindi), it will be a huge number. There are lot of Tamil, Kannada, Bengali blogs and much wider area of coverage.
Mannaran
[...] Credit Pluggd (State of Indian [...]
Rediff blog figures look exceptionally high. It is hard to believe they have such a huge percentage of bloggers blogging on their platform
I think even indiatimes.com offers blogging, I thought it would also get to the list.
Mannaran, you are correct, we all language blogs but cannot determine the content or sentiment of regional and vernacular blogs.
Karan, Rediff has a great number of blogs, but many are dormant, i.e. started with one-two posts and then abandoned.
Uttam, Indiatimes does have a blogging platform, but they dont register very high in terms of actual numbers.
wordpress will take time to be more popular in India since as a whole Blogging is quite new here, but blogger is no match to Wordpress in any sense. There’s a saying in blogoshere
Amateurs Blog at blogger,professional’s at Wordpress & corporates at Typepad..well but no pun intended as I too started blogging from Blogger.
Hello,I am interested in iPhone but I do not know what the best function of iPhone since i
rLtDcT Bravo! Nice Article.,
Hi can someone please translate for me thanx,
Blogspot is definitely user friendly !! Its user interface is simply great. Wonder how they realize what is in the mind of a blogger when designing the UI. I haven’t used wordpress, hence could not comment on that, but wordpress blogs do have a charm (eventhough charm of the blog depends on the content and widgets and ofcourse the template)