Yahoo! pulse with 3.5 million unique users has become the fourth most visited networking site in India
Yahoo’s! launch of Pulse in June and its rebranding initiative to grab the online user’s attention could finally be working.
According to Comscore data, Yahoo! Pulse had 3.5 million visitors in just one month since its launch in June in India. This is not all. Yahoo! owned two of the top ten social networking sites — Yahoo! Pulse with 3.5 million and Yahoo! Buzz with 1.8 million visitors. Last month Yahoo! Pulse became the fourth top social networking site in India, said Comscore data. But market experts say that this could be the social networking phenomenon that has gained steam even in a market like India. This is also evident from the fact that Facebook has replaced Orkut to become the number one social networking site in India for the first time.
Agrees Yahoo! India Managing Director Arun Tadanki, who believes that Yahoo! Pulse is much more than just an integration tool with Facebook. “It is about making social activity easier for users. This is an important part of our social strategy — something that the company has been working for over a year now.”
The company’s social strategy is important in a market like India where the social networking audience grew 43 per cent in the last one year, more than tripling the rate of growth of the total Internet audience in India, said a Comscore data.
More than 33 million Indian Internet users aged 15 or older logged on to social networking sites in July, representing 84 per cent of the total Internet audience. India now ranks as the seventh largest market worldwide for social networking, after the US, China, Germany, Russian Federation, Brazil and the UK.
Unlike some of it competitors, Yahoo’s social strategy has been to focus on partnership to generate traffic, eyeballs and increase penetration among users. Pulse allows Yahoo! users to share and retrieve all Facebook updates and news feed in their Yahoo! Mail inbox. Its partnership with Twitter gives users access to Twitter feeds from within Yahoo. But again Yahoo! is not the only one doing this. iGoogle from search giant Google also allows user to create a personalised page and include integration with social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, said an industry expert. “What probably has worked in favour of Yahoo! Pulse is the seamless integration with social networking sites. Where somehow Google failed with its Buzz,” he further adds.
“We launched a whole lot of features in our Mail product too last year. While I would say this is still early days of our overall plans, the impact is their to see,” said Tadanki. He said Pulse has reached approximately 10 per cent of India’s social internet users.
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Going ahead, the company plans to take its properties like Yahoo! India Cricket, News, Movies and other services on the social network.
Tadanki felt the global rebranding initiative that the company started in September 2009, has had a positive impact on the company’s overall numbers. Its reach has increased from 61 per cent during the same period last year to 73.1 per cent in July this year.
“Moving up 12 percentage points is no mean feat in one year. I think the branding campaign did make a whole lot of difference. A lot of brand campaign is about connecting with people. There was a generation that grew with Yahoo and hence there was no need to make them familiar. But there are a lot of people who have now come to use the internet and need to know about us,” added Tadanki.
The campaign ‘Y!ou’- Every Second Counts, focused on personalisation and how Yahoo would allow people to navigate their services and information online. Yahoo! India frontpage was the most visited homepage in India with 21.7 million unique users per month, according to the July 2010 Comscore data.
After Google, Yahoo has become the second largest online property in India. “I think the rebranding has had a positive impact on Yahoo. But at best they have managed to become the number two. The gap between Yahoo and the number one (Facebook) in social networking and Google in other categories is huge,” said Hareesh Tibrewala, social media strategist and joint CEO of SocialWavelength.com.
But as Tibrewala said that it will take a lot of muscle for Yahoo! to become a number one player in India. Among the overall rankings, Google ranks number one with 37.6 million unique users, whereas Yahoo! follows with 28.9 million and Microsoft with 20.2 million.
This is something that might be bothering Tadanki as well. “The opportunity or challenge in India is not about the reach or market share that one has today but the opportunity or the growth in numbers that one can achieve in future and that is what we want to focus on.”
Some of the properties that Yahoo! would probably cash in on is cricket and news. “We are bringing a lot of emphasis on editorial content. Other than syndicating news, we have started creating exclusive content as well. We have columnists who are working for us. This is a huge focus from our side,” said Tadanki.
The reasons are compelling. Yahoo! India Cricket has emerged as the number one property in India with 2.9 million unique visitors in July, taking its reach to 7.5 per cent.
But the next big opportunity for Tadanki is the mobile space. “This is something that keeps me awake, because the space is so exciting. We think in the next two to three years mobile will become a primary tool for accessing the Internet for many. Add to this the application space. With the growth in application store’s we see an opportunity. We will be making Yahoo propagate through applications stores,” he said. Yahoo!, through its partnership with Nokia, is already on the handsets manufacturer’s Ovi Store and is in talks with all major applications stores.
As Tadanki said this is one of the most exciting time for Yahoo! India and his team is buzzing with activity. However, what remains to be seen is whether this activity makes Yahoo! gain a bigger mind share of the growing internet user in India.