Comments on: Have Indian Content Sites Hit the Ceiling?

By: Daine Turano

Daine Turano — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 20:27:52 +0000

Fantastic Read! Looking forward to more Bookmarked this site. Was also curious if anybody here could point me to some related subject matter. Thanks in advance.

By: Sridhar Turaga (open2save.com)

Sridhar Turaga (open2save.com) — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 10:44:09 +0000

I’d guess majority of usage on these sites is from offices … as PC / Internet penetration at homes is low … and a lot of companies (particularly large IT / ITES) shut down or restricted internet access and personal free time for employees since the start of the recession.

Wondering if that has any bearing on this.

By: Sumeet

Sumeet — Sun, 10 May 2009 17:45:15 +0000

Great post and insightful comments.
Time is inelastic…there are and will be only 24 hrs in a day and people can not spend more time online (rather bringing it down with higher online productivity is a major need)…even if we wish average time spent per user will increase…still the fact remains that at given point in time the total pages that can be visited over internet by one user will be largely flat…and somebody’s gain will be other ones loss..so growth is mainly dependent on increasing the user base.

May be content based portals are loosing to search…which basically distributes the content traffic
some other related trends can be:
- largely users no more care much about which site’s page they visit when it comes to news or tech or any info
- users online exposure has switched to social networks and blogs
- search behavior is convenient and no one likes info overload and average user can not track more than a few sites/services on regular basis
- a lot of online exposure is need based and search driven even for type of content published by the sites in question

By: TIP Guy

TIP Guy — Sat, 09 May 2009 09:05:57 +0000

Ashish,

i believe, the content has not evolved. The quality of content is going down. The our quest of making quick buck or fame, these sites are promoting cross RSS syndication. There is no originality left. If one reads on article on a particular site, you are surely to find same (or similar) on other sites.

In addition, talking about the same news again and again on every site!! readers are not getting new original content. Think? how many times (across all these sites) have you seen market updates? do we really need that?

my observation: quality is not evolving.

By: Arjun Ram

Arjun Ram — Sat, 09 May 2009 09:03:49 +0000

The obvious question is this:

What has changed in these sites in 5 yrs? Any drastic changes? Nope! Content consumption patterns are evolving.

In the same 5 yrs Mytoday has added 4M subs!

You can do the same thing again and again and expect different results.

By: Ashish

Ashish — Sat, 09 May 2009 04:07:48 +0000

Actually not. The traffic overlap is very high between all these sites (esp. the top 4).

New vertical sites, do not get the same traffic (because of it’s niche). The point is this is the max traffic one can get from India (because total # of users have declined? and future doesn’t seem so damn bright?).

-Ashish

By: Anurag Aggarwal

Anurag Aggarwal — Sat, 09 May 2009 03:56:46 +0000

There is one important point that the writer of the article has missed, and that is division of traffic due to evolving new content sites.

Its a simple observation from the graph present here. If all the older sited have maintained or have seen a slight increase in the UVs, and a new site like in.com has 5 million UVs per month that means it may have eaten into the potential increase in traffic for the other sites.

Then there are many new focused content sites for specific information which may not feature on this graph but have significantly taken traffic away from the traditional content sites.

Cheers