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`India casts biggest Net in Asia-Pacific'

Our Bureau

MUMBAI, Aug. 2

INDIA records the highest Internet user growth rate in the Asia-Pacific region and is the fifth largest Internet-user market in the same region, says a Gartner India report on Indian Internet surfing behaviour.

The report estimated the number of regular Internet users in the country at 3.1 million. (Regular Internet usage was defined as surfing for at least one hour per week.)

The number of registered users, (that is, those who have taken ISP accounts) however, would be much fewer and would be around one million, said Gartner officials at a news conference here on Wednesday.

The research, which involved random sampling of over 3,000 families spread across Socio-Economic Category cities A, B and C, has thrown up some interesting details:

It is the cybercafe which is the most popular place of Indian Internet usage: 60 per cent of Indian users surf from cybercafes.

Thirty per cent are multi-users, surfing from more than one location. In this multi-user category, the largest sub-group is the `office+cybercafe' combination, followed by `own home+office combination.'

On the advertising and marketing front, outdoor hoardings and banner ads came right at the bottom as popular sources of awareness of `new' sites.

The average number of banners `clicked through' per surfer per week (click through rates) was a mere 0.74. ``Less than one banner is clicked through by the Indian Internet user in a week,'' said Mr. Lane Leskela, Research Director, e-Market Intelligence Services Asia/Pacific. Not only that, a big chunk of the surfers (41 per cent) could not give any particular reason for clicking on banner links.

Nearly half of the sample group said it was word-of-mouth (from friends, colleagues) recommendation which made them try out a site new to them. This was followed by newspaper and magazine articles, and then by newspaper advertisements, inserted by the si te or portal itself.

Much further down came Web-site links, television advertisements and search-engine referrals; and even further down came magazine advertisements.

The Indian surfer rarely tries out a new site, according to the survey. Fifty-four per cent of the surfers surveyed could not recall having visited any site new to them in the last one week. Of those who did, less than 20 per cent had visited more than f our sites they had not visited before.

Top on the Indian surfer's wish-list comes `Useful

Content', ranked one by over 50 per cent of the surfers in the survey. Two and three on the list were `Easy to use/find information' and `simple linkages' (`Easy to Move from One part of Site to Another') respectively. `Quick and usable response to query ' came fourth.Surprisingly, said Mr. Leskela, download time came only as fifth important in priority to Indian surfers.

The most likely reason for this seems that the Indian surfer, being unexposed to quicker access times, is reconciled to the existing download speeds, said Garter.

Site aesthetics, colours and graphics came in as least important characteristics. ``This is important because companies spend a lot of time on this.''

``Surfers hardly care about site-design errors,'' says the Gartner report.

Only 2.2 per cent of Indian surfers have ever done B2C e-commerce and another 3.6 per cent ever placed orders on the Net.

One-fifth of the non-buyers expressed a distinct interest in buying over the Net; and among the `strong desire' group, over one-fourth have a credit card. ``These users constitute an immediate market opportunity,'' said the Gartner survey report.

The sites most popular for E-transactions were the horizontal ones like Rediff, 123India, Indiainfo, Satyamonline; followed by e-tail verticals like Fabmart and Jaldi.com. ``Company branded sites are yet to make an impression,'' said Mr. Leskela.

New Delhi recorded the highest proportion of people who had done online transactions.

A significant proportion of the users (75 per cent) are more comfortable buying a service, as opposed to a product over the Net. This was even higher (88 per cent) among the purchasing category of users.

The ISP renewal rate was 78 per cent -- that is, 78 per cent of home users had stuck with their first ISP and had renewed their Internet accounts with the same service provider.

Only 11 per cent of surfers have visited Indian language (or non-English) sites; of these one-fifth visit these sites regularly or often. Hindi is the most popular language, followed by Tamil.