How do Indians spend time online? Is any of it really constructive?

Agent 001

You see them everywhere. These horrid numbers and graphs that claim to say something, but always in gibberish or double-Dutch. From Google’s Zeitgeist to your company’s finance department, and your personal Web site’s visitor data to numbers thrown at you in advertising-statistics, they say, never lie. Take, for example, the fact (so says The World Bank) that on average every woman in India gives birth to 2.9 children in their lifetime. What does 0.9 of a baby look like anyway? Is that code for short people, or a baby that’s missing a toe? Anyway, jokes apart, we’re talking about statistics here because we’re looking at all of us Indian Internet users out there. What’s the most popular browser? Which sites do we prefer to visit? What does India do online? If you have such questions, we’re here to give you some answers, and a little bit of insight.

When it comes to the Internet, it’s hard to ignore what Alexa.com has to say. Although the list changes often, depending on what’s hot at the moment, we’re taking a snapshot at the end of June to try and figure out what we’re doing online as a country.

The Front Runners

The top three sites for Indians are Google.co.in, Yahoo.com and Google.com-weird because Google figures twice in the top three. Orkut India comes in a close fourth, and solidifies its position as India’s most popular social networking site. YouTube is fifth, and here we begin to wonder. The average Net access speeds that Indians get certainly doesn’t justify a bandwidth heavy site like YouTube being in the top five. Of course, thanks to the Mahatma and Munna Bhai, maybe we’re just doing some Gandhi-giri with our miserly Internet service providers and being more patient while pages load. Although, whether we need to start our own version of Satyagraha to get more bandwidth without limits is another discussion altogether.

Moving on, we find Blogger at 7, which means we Indians are an expressive bunch. Rapidshare rears its ugly head at 8, making all of us here at Digit go “Ah! There it is!” Apparently, all our anti-piracy articles haven’t really had too much of an effect on the masses. And no, we don’t believe you’re actually using RapidShare’s services to upload and download “legal stuff”. Wikipedia at 10 is something we expected to see when we have Google at 1 and 3, since most of the information seekers that Google-up stuff, usually end up at Wikipedia. Orkut.com at 12, just ahead of Facebook just concretizes the fact that we love Google products.

After Dark

After rank 15, we start getting into the darker alleyways of the Indian mind. So far we’ve been seeing what most of us Indians do when working-with the exception of some social networking and YouTube-ing. Once the sun sets, we Indians cease to be G Rated, and end up scratching that itch. Coming in at 17 is a site that’s notorious for adult-oriented and quite illegal content-XBoard.us. Between the next such site, at 18 and 19, come IMDB and CricInfo, which reinforces the fact that we Indians love our movies and cricket. Then at 20, comes Debonairblog.com, which is another adult site that specializes in MMS-scandals—need we say more? Adult FriendFinder—are there any “real” Indian profiles on it?—finds itself at 24,

reinforcing the fact that we’re probably using the Net to vent repressed frustrations.

After that, we have a lot of scattered “porn sites” (for lack of a better way of categorising them) in the top 100. You have PicsCrazy at 50 (popular for hosting adult still images that are linked to from forums like XBoard.us), Savita Bhabi at 59, Indian Sex Stories at 64, YourFileHost at 70, and Free Sexy Indian forum at 84.

Torrents Of Data

Mininova.org and Torrentz.com are the top Bit Torrent sites at 29 and 33, respectively. Though The Pirate Bay is also popular, it’s a distant third at 51, with ISOHunt fourth at 60. What this means is that although the majority of bandwidth is used up torrenting, this is not so for us Indians. Again, this is an expected phenomenon because of the scarcity of broadband connections, and absolutely no unlimited broadband schemes worth talking about.

Save The Best For Last

IRCTC.co.in (used to book rail tickets online) is at 25, and this tells us that the Government hit the jackpot with that site at least. The Indian Railways site at 30 is the next government site in the list, so other government agencies should take a leaf out of the railways’ book to start offering more important e-services. Understandably, Microsoft.com comes in at 14, because we all use their products—paid for or otherwise. Naukri.com at 15, Monster India at 23 and Times Jobs at 38, are interesting, because that tells us that most of us Indians seem to always be on the lookout for bigger and better opportunities—as we should be!

ICICI Bank is the most popular online, ranked at 32, followed by HDFC at 40. Download.com is our preferred software source at 36, and Reliance makes its presence felt with broadband services at 45 and Zapak at 39. BSNL comes in at 48, and rounds up all the noteworthy sites. You can of course check for changes in the pecking order at Alexa, to keep yourself abreast of the changes.

What Does It Mean?

Now that we’re done with telling you what ranks where, let’s try and make some sense out of the madness that is the Internet. For one thing, we’ve been following the list for some time now, and it’s quite obvious that India is obsessed with adult content. Even if you’re not addicted to it, you just can’t seem to stop yourself from clicking on that suggestive, naughty-looking link and getting an eyeful. Although sites like YouPorn are on and off the top 100 list, voyeurism, it seems, is the order of the day. No one wants firangi porn any more, that’s just boring… Indians would rather look for scandals, and play peeping tom with other Indians. Whether the poor state of sex education, our repressive laws, the so called moral-police, or even the media are responsible for causing this craving for titillation is beyond the scope of this article. The fact remains that it is true, because remember, statistics don’t lie.

Based on data from various torrent watchers, the most popular file formats on the network are AVI and MP3. And it’s not just the MPAA and RIAA that we’re ripping off—because a lot of the content being downloaded is made by the adult film industry.

More porn. Sigh!

When we compare this data to the rest of the world, we find that the first adult site comes in at rank 35, with the big guys (Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft) ruling the roost. There’s also more in terms of constructive usage, though, and sites like Flickr, Craigslist, BBC, Adobe, DeviantArt, and more actually featuring in the list. Obviously porn and torrent sites feature too, but they don’t seem to be too much of a priority for the rest of the world.

What Does It Mean?

With all that data being torrent-ed, and ISPs buckling under massive amounts of data transfer, who do you think suffers? If there’s one big reason why you cannot spend all your free time on YouTube, it’s the BitTorrent network! It’s gotten so bad that ISPs, even in bandwidth heavens like the US and Japan, are starting to impose data transfer limits on their customers. So what makes you think that ISPs here are ever going to let us click-happy Indians get in on any of the 10 Mbps unlimited goodness?

As far as adult oriented content goes, what you do in your home is your business. But if you start clicking pictures of un-suspecting people, violating their privacy and sharing the pictures in order to become popular on a stupid forum… you’ve just digressed to a lower life form. Sadly, the Internet has become just another Window to peep through and satiate our various fetishes. Hopefully, this is all just a phase, and we will all outgrow this criminal behaviour. Until then, we’re going to have to make do with bandwidth limitations, and protect our loved ones from voyeurs. We can all start with leading by example…

agent001@thinkdigit.com

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