By the end of 2014, Indians will surpass American internet users in number, according to Rajan Anandan, managing director of Google India. India already has 243 million internet users and the number grows by the day.
The comparison does not tell us much: passing America is only an indication of India’s much larger population. Internet penetration in India is still relatively low. Only 17.2% of the country has access to to the web. This number also does not reflect how many people are able to access the internet regularly.
Yet it is still a formidable number, and an increasing number of websites offer content by and for only Indians. This despite the strange tendency of internet users in India to frequent websites that have outlived their global popularity.
Here are some websites where Indians can proudly plant their flags and declare this their territory forever more – at least until the website shuts down or something else takes its place.
The website statistics are based on Alexa, an engine that analyses global internet traffic.
1. Quora
Visitor percentage: India: 36.6%, United States: 25.6%
India has already won this battle. Two former Facebook employees started Quora in 2010, hoping to combine the best aspects of Wikipedia and Google. The site allows users – who sign in with their real names – to post questions that can’t be answered by a normal keyword search. Typical questions include “How is school life in different countries?” or “What is the worst part about working at Google?”
But with Indians now Quora’s most numerous users, the tenor of the questions has changed. “What does it feel like to get married through BharatMatrimony?” asks one, another indication of India’s overwhelming preoccupation with marriage. “Why are there disproportionately so many Indians on Quora, compared to average internet demographics?” asks another. Answers are only sometimes adequate.
2. Omegle
Visitor percentage: United States: 19.6%, India: 18.1%
The chat website, launched in 2009, is modelled on the anonymous internet relay chat services of the early years of the internet. It randomly pairs users in text or video conversations.
There is no telling where such conversations will go. Given that users are entirely anonymous unless they directly reveal information about themselves, the site was soon flooded by bots pitching for their adult content websites – a sound strategy, considering how many Omegle conversations begin with “asl” (age, sex, location), the universal internet call to cybersex.
But despite the pornography and aroused men posing as women – or perhaps because of it – the site rapidly became popular in India. Typical conversations today now begin with, “hiii m rahul frm india asl”. There are still more users from the United States than India, but given enough time, that might just change.
3. Stumbleupon
Visitor percentage: United States: 32.1%, India: 31.4%
One unanswered question on Quora asks how many Indians are on Stumbleupon, a content discovery engine that mines users’ history to display related content they might not have seen before. Users in turn add content to the website when they come across interesting links, thus expanding the website’s contextual reserve.
Unlike other websites, the change in user demographic is not immediately discernible. With more Indian users, the likelihood of Indian content being shared also could go up, but Stumbleupon might show Indian content to its Indian users and not necessarily to all others.
4. Stackoverflow
Visitor percentage: United States: 18.4%, India: 17.1%
Stackoverflow is a coding aid forum built on a gaming format. People post difficulties they encounter while programming. Those who answer correctly get reputation points from others for helping the community.
As more Indian IT engineers flock to the website, other users have begun to express scorn for their contributions – someone has even devoted a blog to it. Indians do rank relatively high on the website’s merit list, which does balance out these charges.
5. Orkut
Visitor percentage: Brazil: 52.9%, India: 17.5%
National takeovers of content sharing websites are fairly common. Social media website Orkut is a prime. While Orkut began in the US in 2003, it saw a mass exodus of American users after Brazilians began to throng the site in 2004 and communicated with each other almost exclusively in Portuguese.
Orkut became India’s most-visited website in 2008. Indians flocked to the website, a precursor of Facebook, to write “testis” or testimonials, post public scraps on others’ profiles and join vast communities of potentially like-minded individuals.
This is a lost cause, if any, even if thousands of Indians throng to the website. Google decommissioned Orkut in May and on September 30 will shut it down for good.
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The comparison does not tell us much: passing America is only an indication of India’s much larger population. Internet penetration in India is still relatively low. Only 17.2% of the country has access to to the web. This number also does not reflect how many people are able to access the internet regularly.
Yet it is still a formidable number, and an increasing number of websites offer content by and for only Indians. This despite the strange tendency of internet users in India to frequent websites that have outlived their global popularity.
Here are some websites where Indians can proudly plant their flags and declare this their territory forever more – at least until the website shuts down or something else takes its place.
The website statistics are based on Alexa, an engine that analyses global internet traffic.
1. Quora
Visitor percentage: India: 36.6%, United States: 25.6%
India has already won this battle. Two former Facebook employees started Quora in 2010, hoping to combine the best aspects of Wikipedia and Google. The site allows users – who sign in with their real names – to post questions that can’t be answered by a normal keyword search. Typical questions include “How is school life in different countries?” or “What is the worst part about working at Google?”
But with Indians now Quora’s most numerous users, the tenor of the questions has changed. “What does it feel like to get married through BharatMatrimony?” asks one, another indication of India’s overwhelming preoccupation with marriage. “Why are there disproportionately so many Indians on Quora, compared to average internet demographics?” asks another. Answers are only sometimes adequate.
2. Omegle
Visitor percentage: United States: 19.6%, India: 18.1%
The chat website, launched in 2009, is modelled on the anonymous internet relay chat services of the early years of the internet. It randomly pairs users in text or video conversations.
There is no telling where such conversations will go. Given that users are entirely anonymous unless they directly reveal information about themselves, the site was soon flooded by bots pitching for their adult content websites – a sound strategy, considering how many Omegle conversations begin with “asl” (age, sex, location), the universal internet call to cybersex.
But despite the pornography and aroused men posing as women – or perhaps because of it – the site rapidly became popular in India. Typical conversations today now begin with, “hiii m rahul frm india asl”. There are still more users from the United States than India, but given enough time, that might just change.
3. Stumbleupon
Visitor percentage: United States: 32.1%, India: 31.4%
One unanswered question on Quora asks how many Indians are on Stumbleupon, a content discovery engine that mines users’ history to display related content they might not have seen before. Users in turn add content to the website when they come across interesting links, thus expanding the website’s contextual reserve.
Unlike other websites, the change in user demographic is not immediately discernible. With more Indian users, the likelihood of Indian content being shared also could go up, but Stumbleupon might show Indian content to its Indian users and not necessarily to all others.
4. Stackoverflow
Visitor percentage: United States: 18.4%, India: 17.1%
Stackoverflow is a coding aid forum built on a gaming format. People post difficulties they encounter while programming. Those who answer correctly get reputation points from others for helping the community.
As more Indian IT engineers flock to the website, other users have begun to express scorn for their contributions – someone has even devoted a blog to it. Indians do rank relatively high on the website’s merit list, which does balance out these charges.
5. Orkut
Visitor percentage: Brazil: 52.9%, India: 17.5%
National takeovers of content sharing websites are fairly common. Social media website Orkut is a prime. While Orkut began in the US in 2003, it saw a mass exodus of American users after Brazilians began to throng the site in 2004 and communicated with each other almost exclusively in Portuguese.
Orkut became India’s most-visited website in 2008. Indians flocked to the website, a precursor of Facebook, to write “testis” or testimonials, post public scraps on others’ profiles and join vast communities of potentially like-minded individuals.
This is a lost cause, if any, even if thousands of Indians throng to the website. Google decommissioned Orkut in May and on September 30 will shut it down for good.