Survey: Yahoo Top Portal, Shaadi And BM Tie In Matrimony

Indian internet research company JuxtConsult has released the various findings of their latest India Online 2006 Report. You have already read about their finding that 86% of the net users read blogs and 41% prefer language websites. Now this one is about the popular Indian websites across 14 categories based on a user preference study.
Yahoo! is the most top-of-the-mind brand among the Indian urban internet users. A 35 per cent of the internet users recall it as the first website that comes to their mind, followed by Google (21%), Rediff (15%), Indiatimes (5%) and Hotmail (5%). The other finding peculiar to India is that Hotmail is more popular than MSN (Sabeer Bhatia effect!).
The survey received over 20,000 responses from internet users and an additional 5500 responses were offline.
Yahoo has also emerged as the most preferred website for 4 of the 14 popular activities, namely emailing, online gaming, dating/friendship and cinema content. While 37% users prefer Yahoo for email, 24% opt for Rediff, and 12% for Gmail. Wait a minute. Gmail has grown faster than others and has eaten into the share of Hotmail and Indiatimes (I shifted from Yahoo to Gmail when the latter was launched).

Classifieds
Shaadi.com and Bharatmatrimony.com are the two biggest websites in the online matrimonial space as both command 33% each in user preference. So they are going neck to neck in this vertical. Jeevansathi.com is no. 3 with 16%, and they were not there in the top five list last year.
In jobs, Naukri is far ahead of the competition with 49% of the online audienceing to find a job. Monster.com is second with 19%, while Timesjob.com is no. 3 with 7% usage.
In online ticketing, there is no surprise. As expected, Irctc.co.in or Indian Railways leads the category with 38% share in user preference. In air travel, Makemytrip.com leads with 9% user share. (We need to see what will be their share next year since the market is going to be fragmented).

News genre
Indiatimes is still the leading player in news, however, its share has come down from 30% to 16%. NDTV.com has 13% market share while Rediff controls 12% of this category.
For online shopping, Ebay is the most preferred with 38%, while Google is the number one in search with 77% share, followed by Yahoo with 6% and Rediff 4%.
Moneycontrol is the leader in the financial content with 12% user preference, Yahoo and Google are second and third with 11% and 10% share. Rediff is the website of choice for users who download mobile content from the net with 23% user preference and its Yahoo (22%) and Indiatimes (14%).
Ok, now, what is your take on this survey?
Related:
86% Of Indian Net Users Read Blogs; 41% Prefer Local Language Sites: Survey

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