Do 46% of Indians access Orkut?
By Bala Shah

ComScore is a global leader in measuring the digital world and is reliably quoted by most international media and tech business.  But it seems that some of its analysis about India is based on questionable data sets.  One of the big challenges facing anyone reporting on the Indian internet scene is that no one is sure how big or small it is.

The Internet & Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) in conjunction with IMRB has released a report saying that our country has 52 million active users with a whopping 37 percent accessing internet through Cyber Cafes.  Highly regarded JuxtConsult has published a report showing that only 6 percent of the Indian net users exclusively logon via Cyber Cafes. Both of these are Indian companies but have a different understanding on how many Indians user Cyber Cafes.

US-based ComScore on April 7, 2010, released its report on social networking activity in the Asia-Pacific region (excluding China) based on data from its World Metrix service. Their study found that 50.8 percent of the total online population in the Asia-Pacific region visited a social networking site in February 2010, reaching a total of 240.3 million visitors. Facebook.com ranked as the top social network across the majority of individual markets in the region, while competing brands commanded the top position in certain markets, including Orkut in India, Mixi.jp in Japan, CyWorld in South Korea and Wretch.cc in Taiwan.

In February 2010, Internet users in the Asia-Pacific region averaged 2.5 hours on social networking sites during the month and visited the category an average of 15 times. Across markets, the Philippines showed the highest penetration of social networking usage with more than 90 percent of its entire Web population visiting a social networking site during the month, followed by Australia (89.6 percent penetration) and Indonesia (88.6 percent penetration).

According to ComScore, 68.5 percent of Indian net users have access to social networking sites.

The same report says that while Facebook dominates in Asia Pacific, 46.8 percent of Indian net users accessed Orkut in Feb, 2010.

In the same breath, ComScore, qualified that its reports “Excludes visitation from public computers such as Internet cafes or access from mobile phones or PDAs.’

If the Internet & Mobile Association of India is to be believed, 37 percent of Indian net users logon via Cyber Cafes.  So,  how can ComScore exclude Cyber Cafes and still expect to be credible about such social networking statistics?