Internet Usage In India: Quantifying the Myth
Source: http://www.internetworldstats.com/top20.htm
There has been much scepticism in the Indian entrepreneurial and investor community about reported
figures for active internet users in India. The official figures tend to count anybody who has EVER used the
Internet.
© 2009, Shyam Kamadolli, Fidelity India Capital Partners

Online users at Indian IPs are active
India sourced Unique Visitors (Apr 2009)
Highly generalized usage classification
(source: Shyam Kamadolli, Fidelity India Capital Partners)
35 Google/Yahoo (~30M)
30
Unique visitors (Millions)
25 Social Media (~12M)
20
Domestic transactional sites: travel, jobs (~5M)
15
10
Long tail of general entertainment, gaming, etc. (~2M)
5
0
1 4 7 10 13 16 19 22 25 28 31 34 37 40 43 46 49
Site Rank by unique visitors (source: Vizisense)
Note:
Anecdotal evidence from webmasters indicates there are approximately 40M internet users in India (more later)
Unique visitor estimates do not include significant numbers at Internet Cafés and similar NAT-ed networks
© 2009, Shyam Kamadolli, Fidelity India Capital Partners

Estimating online users: online and mobile
Mobile: Low PC penetration + nearly
400 mobile subs implies a lot of Internet
activity is mobile
42M GPRS users in Metro regions 4.2M
active mobile internet users
2% of non-metro and non-rural subs are
active GPRS users 7M active mobile
internet users
My conservative estimate: 8M active
PC based: 6.6M broadband plus a
fraction of 70M dialup
Based on Vizisense data and anecdotal
evidence, atleast 40M unique visitors
frequent the top 10 sites atleast twice a
month and spending atleast 5 minutes per
visit
My conservative estimate: 35M active
Total addressable users: 43M
© 2009, Shyam Kamadolli, Fidelity India Capital Partners