ViziSense, an online audience measurement and analytics platform, on July 23, 2009 released its monthly web rankings of the top five sites by category for the month of June 2009. These top sites have been ranked across 18 categories. The rankings are for sites with the highest ‘unique’ users within that category.

The monthly web ranking data claims to provide a macro-view of traffic and popularity metrics across key categories with insights into the top performing online properties, audience reach and usage and audience duplication within the category. The categories include web portals, job search, search, social networking, photo and video sharing, email, education, matrimony, real estate, travel e-commerce, ecommerce, banking, B2C classifieds, B2B classifieds, automobiles, entertainment, music and sports.

Report Insights

According to ViziSense data, social networking and photo and video sharing sites are high on the popularity charts, as 50 per cent of the Indian Internet audience finds themselves hooked on to these sites. For instance, the category of social networking for June 2009 shows Orkut (both orkut.co.in and orkut.com) leading with 14.9 million unique users, followed by Facebook with 6.92 million unique users. Bharatstudent.com ranked third with 2.49 million unique users, ibibo.com with 2.29 unique users ranked fourth, and Tagged.com with 1.53 million unique users were listed among the top five websites.

In the email category Yahoo! Mail had 18.3 million users in June 2009, while Gmail.com had 17.2 million unique users. Rediffmail.com and MSN mail, on the other hand, were with 6.50 million and 4 million unique users, while the newly launched in.com had 913K unique users.

In an email interaction with exchange4media, Amit Bhartiya, Business Head, ViziSense, said, “ViziSense independently determines unique users and other traffic-related statistics for over 10,000 sites trafficked by Indian users and determines the top ranking sites.”

What do these rankings mean?

“Over time, these rankings will display key trends in Internet user behaviour. For instance, it is interesting to see Gmail catching up with Yahoo! Mail in India,” said Bhartiya.

According to him, the growth of the digital medium in India is said to have several challenges. Apart from the infrastructural hurdles related to Internet access in India, the other challenge is the number of online users, and the credibility of the medium with advertisers.

It may be recalled that in 2006, Komli Media had initiated operations with a similar focus on performance advertising. Last year the online audience measurement and analytical platform launched ‘Brand Solutions Group’ that claims to have a number of offerings focused on the brand advertising space thus offering transparency and premium quality to publishers.

(Additional inputs by Robin Thomas)