State of Internet in India - Analysis on comscore data

Comscore recently held a webinar on state of Internet in Asia pacific which threw up some very interesting data and some obvious questions regrading the Indian Internet

1. India has 35.4 Million users of Internet according to comscore which is up by 17% over last year ( ages 15+ accessing internet from home or work computer) which makes it the third largest in Asia pacific after China and Japan
2. 77% of Indian web audience is under the age of 35 and 41% is below the age of 24
3. Audiences in almost all major Asia Pacific regions consume internet content in their local languages with the exception of India
4. Books and Computer Software are the only 2 categories where  e commerce is gaining some small traction otherwise pure ecommerce ( non travel) is very much in its infancy in India.
5. Entertainment reaches 63.8% of  Indian internet users and Indian users spend on an average 1.3 hours in a month on this which is half of APAC average.
6. Indian users spend the lowest amount of time online in Asia Pacific at 11 hours in a month which is half of that of global average of 22.4 hours
7. News information sites reached 41.8 % of users in India
8. Average searches per searcher is also the lowest in India.

The above data points out that internet is yet to mature in India and there is lot of scope for growth and secondly this growth is likely to only come when local languages become dominant on the internet as is evident from places in Asia Pacific especially China. A search in Hindi (हिंदी) on Google will lead you at least 5-10 times lower number of results compared to that in english. Indian audience are young and have not started spending a lot of time on the internet yet and don't move away from there core work of email, social networks etc which is why other sites in India have struggled to gain traction in India.. But then there is another way  to look at this data that India has huge potential of growth and as the internet audiences matures and grow older they will become more valuable and will start exploring internet for more useful informations and then those who already built a brand name over a period of time will be hugely successful.