MUMBAI: Youth networking site Bigadda.com has enrolled about 1.24 million Indian youth in just four months of its launch. Launched on 13 August, it has become the largest and the fastest growing Indian youth networking site. This is a milestone for the company in its journey towards the goal of building a 10 million strong Indian community by 2010.
While India’s top 20 cities account for 50 per cent of its users, 40 per cent of the users come from tier-II towns like Tuticorin, Bhilai, Amritsar, Guwahati, Surat, Nasik etc. The site gets almost 10 per cent of its users from countries like Sri Lanka, Pakistan and from Indians in Dubai, US and UK.
More than 78 per cent of the users are between 16-27 years and are mainly school and colleges goers.
As compared to the global social networking sites in India, Bigadda is more younger because the other sites have about 60 per cent of their users under 25 years of age.
While 40 per cent of users consume videos and share them, 57 per cent of the users have created their photo galleries.
Bigadda.com has both individuals who form their nodes and network by taking their physical relations online and individuals connecting with each other on similar interests.
Reliance Entertainment president Rajesh Sawhney says, “I believe that social networking platforms are for real. It is becoming the centre of their social graph. We are in the very early stages of this phenomenon. It will take off with the evolution of broadband. When we talk of social networking sites there are two aspects. One is social networks while the other is social media. Social networking sites focus on connectivity and communication. Social media sites look at user generated, user rated content.”
BigAdda CEO Siddhartha Roy says, “Getting a user base of 1 million users in a short time is an achievement for BigAdda. According to the 2007 NASSCOM Report, it is estimated that by 2010 there will be 20 million Broadband subscribers, up from 1 million and 100 million Internet users, as compared to 36 million today. These numbers are going to go up and the curve will only get steeper.”
BigAdda is targeting to connect 10 million Indian youth by 2010. They are looking at taking networking originating from the web onto the mobile by the first quarter of 2008.
