David strikes Goliath again, with Facebook overtaking Google’s Orkut in India.
Orkut was leading social networking scene in India, but marketing research company comScore reported says not anymore.
According to comScore, Facebook climbed to the number one spot in July 2010 with 179 percent growth in the last one last year, while Orkut registered a growth of 16 percent within the same time period.
An interesting fact shown by the report is the popularity of social networking sites in India. In July 2010, more than 33 million internet users age 15 and above visited social networking sites, representing 84 percent of the total internet audience in India.
“The social networking phenomenon continues to gain steam worldwide, and India represents one of the fastest growing markets at the moment,” says Will Hodgman, comScore executive vice president for the Asia-Pacific region. “Though Facebook has tripled its audience in the past year to pace the growth for the category, several other social networking sites have posted their own sizeable gains.”
In terms of unique users, Facebook took the top spot with 20.9 million users, orkut dropped to second with 19.6 million users, and Twitter with 3.3 million users took the fifth place.
Twitter show the highest growth rate with an impressive growth of 239 percent from last year.
India now the world’s seventh largest market for social networking. In terms of unique visitors for social networking sites, United States retains top spot, followed by China, Germany, Russian Federation, Brazil, United Kingdom, India, France, Japan, and South Korea.
Note: This comScore data reports doesn’t include visitation from public computers such as internet cafes or access from mobile phones and PDAs.
