Who owns India’s Internet Traffic?

India currently has over 80 million Internet subscribers and this figure is poised to triple by 2015. It has also grown by more than 50% in the last one year, illustrating a bright future of India’s Internet industry.

A recent study by Experian Hitwise has shown some key insights about Internet traffic and usage in India. The study has reported that Google, Google India and Facebook are the most visited websites in India, accounting for 25% of the entire Internet visits in India. Google owns India’s Internet traffic but Facebook is close behind. Catch the table below:

Some take aways from the above figures:

• Google continues to lead in India
• Google Inc. has 6 websites out of the 10 under its belt; they own 29.41% of India’s internet traffic
• Google (www.google.co.in) is the most visited website in India, representing 11.13% of all Indian Internet visits
• Facebook has more visits than big players like Yahoo , Youtube and even Gmail for that matter. I won’t be surprised if Facebook were to surpass Google as the Number 1 website like it did in the U.S.
• If we only consider social networking sites, Facebook rules at number 1 and accounts for more than 33.33% of the internet visits followed by Youtube

The study has also concluded a list of most popular sub-industries across all industry categories ranked by visits share:

Some take aways from the above figures:

• Search engines are the most visited category of websites in India with 19.59% of all Indian Internet visits
• Social networks and Forums rank second and are taking over the Internet traffic pie at a very healthy rate
• Games websites are not picking up with the trend because of social gaming on the social networks itself

Clearly, search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) remain as important advertising channels with millions of people searching on the web. But brands are learning to extend their digital reach further through social media. Social channels like Facebook and Twitter will continue to challenge Google dominance in India. For example, MTV India has recently launched a successful campaign via Twitter. This budget could be spent on Google ads. However, it seems that Twitter has proven to be more effective (at least for this case) as the campaign went on the trending topic list.