Rise of India's digital denizens

India’s rapidly growing online denizens are largely young, male, love to play games and read news online. The average transaction on the very busy Indian Railways site, IRCTC, is $17 (Rs 935) while that on popular online bookstore Flipkart is $34 (Rs 1,925). Funnily enough, this young consumer’s third-most favourite news website is New York Times digital.

These, among other things, is what ComScore’s latest report, ‘Rise of India’s Digital Consumer’, released at a Webinar recently, says. The $232-million ComScore is a US-based digital analytics firm that does syndicated and customised research. The report shows numbers on everything from traffic to engagement to the increasing popularity of video in India. The country is now the fastest growing online market among its BRIC contemporaries. There are three takeaways from the report.

One, the huge growth in the use of online media for travel, games and retail over last year. Two, the growth of non-resident Indian (NRI) consumers. Back in the 90s, when the net had just come to India and penetration was low, many media firms set up portals to serve NRIs. Between 20 and 50 per cent of the traffic on mainstream Indian news sites like NDTV.com or manorama.com comes from NRIs. Three, the slow offtake of online media on mobiles and other devices liek tablets.(Click here for chart & graph)

The pages viewed on mobile phones rose to seven per cent in July 2012 from three per cent a year ago. Mobile and tablet access contributed seven per cent of the online pages viewed. Even if we discount low tablet penetration, the figure is very low, given that there are about 900 million mobile users in India. Roughly half of them are capable of accessing wireless data services, according to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India. This, then means that good quality bandwidth and price are still an issue for mobile data.