Democratic India Lags Behind Censored China In Online Market

Bloomberg: Even though India offers freedom of expression and a democratic political environment, China, which restricts any such freedom, is well ahead of India in terms of a market for online media.
“It does seem ironic that India, with its democratic government and free press, is so far behind China in developing its Internet market,” says David Wolf, managing director of Wolf Group Asia, a Beijing-based regional consulting firm. “The simple reason is that China has the infrastructure and India doesn’t.”
Undeterred by China’s restrictions, Yahoo, owner of the world’s most-visited Web portal, invested $120 million in a Chinese search engine in 2003. Last year it started an auction site in China, where total online revenue hit $1.1 billion. India, an English-speaking democracy that allows freer flow of information, had online revenue of just $93 million.
The number of Web users in China has expanded sevenfold in eight years to 94 million. India, whose population of 1.1 billion is close to China’s, has 24 million Internet users. Yahoo employs 600 people in China, 10 times as many as in India.

Comments have been disabled for this post