Smaller towns and languages are important in the Indian internet space

Today’s article in Times Of India mentioned about smaller towns in India are fueling the growth of Internet in India.

Internet usage in India has grown more than 11 times over the last seven years. The boom is being driven not by metros, but by smaller and non-metro towns, where the number of users has risen by a whopping 69 times and 33 times respectively since 2000.

The number of users has grown in all socio-economic categories, as well as in all metros and non-metro towns. In absolute terms, the top eight metros still have the largest numbers. However, the growth has been the fastest in the smaller and non-metro towns. In fact, small towns have the second largest number of total users after the top eight metros put together, where the total number has grown by just over five times…More

It is good to see the growth coming from non-metros as the need for Indian languages only increases with the number of internet users growing from non-metros. Oneindia has seen impressive growth of traffic to their language portals since Jan 2006 from non-metros and we see it only growing further.

The  Govt has decided to promote Indian language domainnames from Jan 2008. I believe for some time we will have more “readers/consumers” of Indian languages on the internet than “writers/contributors”. It may be a little difficult to type Indian language domainnames in the address bar of browsers but still this is a welcome move.

India is all set to join the global bandwagon of local language domain names. Soon you will be able to own domain names in Hindi, Tamil, Sanskrit, Bengali, Punjabi and some other Indian languages. ISPs are welcoming the move as IDNs (Internationalised Domain Names) have been very popular in helping penetrate internet across the world…More

Tier-II cities are important for advertisers and language portals will be a perfect medium to reach the internet surfers from Tier-II cities.