Oneindia.in close to completing 4 years, ranked 4th in India

I had seen the comScore October 2009 report for Oneindia.in just 10 days ago but I never bothered to get into the rankings.

The official PR from comScore ranks 4th Oneindia.in in the news category in India. Oneindia.in will be completing 4 years of operation on Dec 31, 2009. Hopefully, our ranking has nothing to do with the number of years of operation!

Most of us in India go by Alexa ranking because it is “free”. comScore is used by the investment community, ad agencies to get a more accurate picture of an internet site. Very few can afford comScore, startups/non-funded companies rarely can afford comScore.

Earlier comScore was not very accurate about Indian portals (especially about internet traffic from India). Lately, they have improved a lot (I am not saying this because Oneindia.in’s numbers are good!). From what I understand some cookies are being placed by them to get a more accurate picture of traffic from India. The PR says,

“The number of online news and information consumers in India surged 37 percent in the past year, more than double the rate of growth of the total online audience in India,” said Will Hodgman, comScore executive vice president for the Asia-Pacific region.

The Times of India captured the #3 spot in terms of visitation reaching 2.6 million visitors during the month (up 78 percent), while Oneindia.in surged 148 percent to 2.4 million visitors. The Hindu Group, the fifth most visited news property in India, reached nearly 1.6 million visitors in October (up 19 percent).

Top 10 News/Information Sites in India Based on Unique Visitors October 2009 vs. October 2008 Total India Internet Audience*, Age 15+ – Home & Work Locations Source: comScore World Metrix
	Total Unique Visitors (000)
	Oct-2008	Oct-2009	% Change
Total Internet : Total Audience	31,179	36,170	16
News/Information	11,529	15,838	37
Yahoo! News	3,312	4,169	26
New York Times Digital	2,306	3,854	67
The Times of India**	1,476	2,626	78
Oneindia.in	949	2,359	148
The Hindu Group	1,299	1,551	19
The Indian Express Group	925	1,244	35
HT Media Ltd	1,088	1,155	6
NDTV.com	848	1,104	30
BBC	777	992	28
The Economic Times**	769	820	7

 

Top 10 News/Information Sites in India Based on Unique Visitors October 2009 Total India Internet Audience*, Age 15+ – Home & Work Locations Source: comScore World Metrix
	Average Minutes per Visitor	Average Pages per Visitor
Total Internet : Total Audience	700.6	1,155
News/Information	22	38
Yahoo! News	3.6	9
New York Times Digital	3.7	5
The Times of India**	14.3	27
Oneindia.in	5.8	13
The Hindu Group	3.6	4
The Indian Express Group	5.3	7
HT Media Ltd	11.5	24
NDTV.com	11.3	15
BBC	7.6	9
The Economic Times**	10	20

*Excludes visitation from public computers such as Internet cafes or access from mobile phones or PDAs.
**The Times of India and Economic Times are both channels included in the Times Internet Ltd property.

The entire team at Oneindia.in is excited by the above graph. It is no small achievement. We are not a VC funded company and we are in a space everyone is scared of  – Indian Languages. We have always believed Indian languages will have its own “big” space in the Indian internet space (English will always be there).  But it is really upto the team at Oneindia.in to make languages a bigger success and be assured we are working towards it.