Categories: Internet

Internet user base in India swells to 485 million

If there is one thing the internet entrepreneurs have been complaining in India it is about the low internet user base. It is not exactly low when you see in isolation but for a country with 1.2 billion population 120-150 million internet users is not something to celebrate about.

Now comes the Good, Bad & Ugly news.

Pankaj Pachauri (@PankajPachauri), Communications Adviser to the Prime Minister of India’s Office tweeted a graph which represented the number of Internet users in India

FACT: We are on Twitter bcoz Broadband and internet subscribers have increased from 4.7 million to 485.6 m ! pic.twitter.com/rdNzHOpFz2

— Pankaj Pachauri (@PankajPachauri) July 11, 2013

What is the differentiation between an broadband subscriber and internet subscriber? Usually we talk about broadband connections (about 15 million in April 2013) and internet users.

The source of the data according to the infographic is TRAI (mentioned on page 43 of ebook). These numbers are very exciting. But now the bad & ugly news for us at Oneindia.in is – we seem to have a very small market share in India. Until now we were calculating our market share based on 120m internet users.

According to comscore June 2013 figures India has 77 million desktop users who use the internet (home & office only, cyber cafe excluded). IAMAI, Nasscom & comscore should relook at the way they are calculating the number of internet users in India.

Need to get back to the white board on improving our market share.

BG Mahesh

Internet application ideator and implementor. Been there and done that since early 1990s. I like to present data to the common man in the simplest manner on the internet.