India Internet Usage Trend : JuxtConsult

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Cerius Shah writes about JuxtConsult’s report on India Internet Usage Trends.I was trying to know what it would mean from a product manager’s point of view. My observations are not limited to this report but how one should interpret such report and how to make sense for you own products. These reports are highly useful for any Internet company if you draw the right conclusions. In past 10 years I have understood that Reports & Survyes are like modern art paintings, for some it doesn’t make any sense for others it surely does.

Also, I am not critical of this report as others are. Why ? I have carried two/three surveys myself and I know it would take some super solid psychiatrist & mathematician to give you even the accuracy of 80%. But people who actually work on products know the 80-20 percent rule and would know what to understand from this. Also this report is based on what users claim and not what JuxtConsult claims.

Growth Indicator

If India Internet Urban Usage grew by 19% percent treat it as a figure like - GDP ; this doesn’t mean that your product’s growth rate has to be the same. It just means in a vast pool, some few more buckets were added. This data is more relevant for the established products categories like search engines & horizontal portals and they would see the year-on-year impact of this trend. A product in a growth stage has nothing to do with this. It’s just an indicator that market is performing well.

Daily Users

This is the bread and butter of any web site. This number you should never reveal to the outside world but keep it close to your heart and self-introspection. This is true both for open sites and for sites with authentication, and if you are not seeing growth in this you are in serious trouble. You would be surprised to know that majority of the Indian Net Users fall into once in a month & once in one/two weeks. So understand the classification of various types of users and how you can boost their usage and force them to come to your site.

Yeah! Social Media

81% of the users use social media platform. Now nobody seems to agree with my definition of social media so there you suffer. Please read this data as UGC data and I am sure even that would be wrong, why ? I would never treat chatting as social media, just remove those users from this and you would see a grand dip in this 81%. But that’s not the problem with JuxtConsult, it’s the problem with Internet Industry - we have removed the intelligence and representation from the word ’social’ & ‘media’. Anything and everything is social these days and anything and everything shouts to be media these days.

Top 5 activities

India is still at the very nascent stage of the growth (considering our overall population). If this is 10th year of your Internet usage, for majority of new Internet population they just figured out how to click compose and send. The Internet in India will be still be dominated by people who provide search & email and are better in doing that. I would not doubt the Top 5 activities cited in this report: Emailing (91%), Job Search (72%), Messaging (70%), Reading News (63%) and Sports (57%). But I may want to replace sports with Movies. But users tend to bring more of their serious or active side on the net.

Preferred Location

What does this mean for you as a product manager. This shapes your peak traffic during the day and gives you highs/low over the weekend. But again this is required to super fine tune the performance of your site and only meant for people with deep understanding of the product and their users. Most of the others should not feel too happy or sad to know what it means.

Net Access Points

Do not think at all from net access point of view when you are working on a product. Just ask yourself, is your service worth and/or really usable on mobile. There is no need to grab the share of the mobile usage if that share is going to be absolutely pathetic. Focus on maintaining the growth story of your core offering be it web or mobile. 0% web & 100% mobile or 100% web & 0% mobile both product scenarios are possible.

Top of the mind recall

Try to list down the reasons why these companies are there and now try to see if something is applicable to your products and market. Don’t take this too seriously though, some brands can feature here because they just had a big advertising campaign and therefore the recall might be high. And also, when you ask somebody a question he would dare not show his/her ignorance and would always come up with something from TV/Newpaper if nothing was available from his/her actual keyboard.

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