I came across an interesting article today “Why Women Rule The Internet” (reading a bit late though). Recently I had written about non-US traffic was giving the valuations for Facebook & Twitter. For a long time, I believe internet companies have recognized the power of the women user base on the net. The article highlights,
- Facebook—over 600 million users. Twitter—25 billion tweets last year. Tumblr—1 billion page views a week. Zynga—100 million users
- Female users are the unsung heroines behind the most engaging, fastest-growing, and most valuable consumer internet and e-commerce companies. Especially when it comes to social and shopping, women rule the Internet.
- Comscore says women are the majority of users of social networking sites and spend 30% more time on these sites than men; mobile social network usage is 55% female according to Nielsen.
- In e-commerce, female purchasing power is also pretty clear. Sites like Zappos (>$1 billion in revenue last year), Groupon ($760m last year), Gilt Groupe ($500m projected revenue this year), Etsy (over $300m in GMV last year), and Diapers ($300m estimated revenue last year) are all driven by a majority of female customers. And 77% of Groupon’s customers are female according to their site.
- According to Gilt Groupe, women are 70% of the customer base and they drive 74% of revenue.
- Women on Facebook account for 62% of activity in terms of messages/comments, 71% of the daily fan activity.
- Women have 8% more Facebook friends on average than men and spend more time on the site.
While we may not have the exact statistics of this detail for India, I was able to dig out the demography of Facebook, Twitter & Orkut in India.
According to ComScore Feb 2011, they have tracked 42 million internet users in India, of which 27.5m are male, 14.9m are female (all above 15 years of age)
| Users (m) | Total | Male | Female |
| 30.0 | 27.5 | 11.2 | |
| 4.4 | 2.8 | 1.6 | |
| Orkut | 10.1 | 6.5 | 3.5 |
| 2.9 | 2.0 | 0.9 |
| Daily Visitors (m) | Total | Male | Female |
| 8.50 | 5.20 | 3.30 | |
| 0.35 | 0.23 | 0.12 | |
| Orkut | 1.20 | 0.80 | 0.40 |
| 0.21 | 0.15 | 0.06 |
While the first table shows 2.9 million users are using Twitter from India, they don’t seem to be very loyal when it comes to usage. Women on Twitter in India seems to be dismissively low. Recently Twitter celebrated its 5th anniversary. (my quote in DNA)
| Average minutes spent per day | Male | Female |
| 20.7 | 23.2 | |
| 7.7 | 7.0 | |
| Orkut | 1.5 | 1.4 |
| 3.8 | 4.7 |
Women users from India are not that behind the usage of LinkedIn. That could be because most of the users in India on LinkedIn are from the IT/software field and that has a reasonable ratio of women workforce.
| Average Minutes per Visit | Male | Female |
| 9.4 | 11.0 | |
| 6.1 | 5.7 | |
| Orkut | 1.2 | 1.1 |
| 3.0 | 3.7 |
The above two tables show women spend more time than men on social networking sites (except Orkut). I can surely see that behaviour at my own house.
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