INDIA'S TOP WEBSITES
Outlook, (Bharat Ahluwalia and Charubala Annuncio), February 21, 2000

They stare you in the face. Spending a crore a month in full-page magazine and newspaper advertisements, on TV shows and hoardings, in cybercafes and on your computer screen, always. The dotcoms are out to get you. They want your eyeballs. And are they succeeding.

As India logs on to the Net, portals are springing up faster than you can say Yahoo! (for the uninitiated, portals are, well, websites that are much bigger than mere "websites", and portals can be both horizontal and vertical, and the vertical ones are usually referred to as vortals, though horizontal ones are never referred to as hortals, and...you get the drift). In 1999, 4.5 lakh domain names were registered by Indians-and this does not include NRIS. And Indian websites are getting your time and attention. Three months ago, satyamonline and indiaworld clocked 13 million page views touch 36 million. Even year-old portals register page views in the millions. For instance, in less than a year, contest2win.co registers 2.5 millions monthly page views. And in five months, Bangalore-based Fabmart gets to 2.1 million. The big daddy of them all, rediff.com, registers close to 30 million. And cricket.org, perhaps the most popular sports website outside the US, gets 87 million hits a month of which 45 per cent (39 million) are from Indians.

So, which are India's favourite sites? And why do we love them so much, for some to spend every waking moment surfing? For this and more, Outlook commissioned MDRA to conduct a poll among Net users in six cities (see charts). Any surprises? Well, not at the top. Expectedly, rediff.com, indiatimes.com, satyamonline.com and cricket.org topped. The surprises lie lower down the order, with economictimes.com and indiainfoline.com-the two most popular financial news sites-at 25 and 26 respectively.

It's the horizontal portals (which provide everything from news to e-commerce to e-mails) which top the list by a wide margin. Why? "Well, there's no magic formula here," says Ajit Balakrishnan, the man behind rediff. Horizontal portals allow surfers to do so many things that a little bit of everything adds up to a whole lot. With the indiaworld acquisition, satyamonline added 13 new channels-like samachar.com, khel.com and bawarchi.com-to its existing bouquet of 22. For instance, while a netizen looking for news might log on to samachar.com, he may see the link to bawarchi.com and go there too. That helps the portal as a whole increase page views. So, while khel.com figures at No.8 on the poll listing and samachar.com at 37, their parent satyamonline occupies the No.3 slot.

But ask the men behind the sites on why they are where they are, and you get different answer. "Authenticity," stresses Balakrishnan. "We check and re-check information to maintain the highest journalistic values." Nirmal Jain of indiaonline differs. "Customer, customer, customer. It's all about fathoming, sometimes pre-empting what he wants and needs and giving it in the right packaging."

The bottomline, though, is content. Cricket.org has 2 lakh pages of cricket-related content and maintains official websites for the ICC and the Australia, New Zealand, Pakistan, South Africa and Zimbabwe cricket boards. It gives live or same-day scoreboards, including live scores from all international games and live statistics.

And it doesn't just stop there. Hear Arvind Kajaria, director, 123india.com, No. 6 in the poll: "The site design, server speed, publicity and marketing and ease of use are very important."

But surfer is discerning. Says American Express marketing manager Sheetal Talwar: "I dropped rediff for satyamonline as it gives better information." Others have ditched both rediff and economictimes for indiainfoline. Says Amit Bhalla, consultant at Arthur Andersen: "Apart from the financial news, I find indiaonline's database and share portfolio tracker very useful." Strong beliefs for a six-month Net veteran. Dotcoms need to guard against such fickle customers.

One way is to be as responsive as possible to visitors. Rediff receives close to 5,9000 e-mails every day-Balakrishnan himself gets about 800-most of which are answered the same day or the next. "The user is an individual and not just another user ID," explains Sanjay Mehta of homeindia.com, which boasts 1 lakh registered users, apart from occasional users which give him one million monthly page views. How have these sites managed to lock these users in? Indiainfoline, for instance, allows you to track your stocks on its site, ensuring regular visits. Or take the Bangalore-based ITspace.com. It's a site focused on the information technology professional and features industry news and articles written on the subject, apart from providing online advice on job placements. While its market may be restricted to the 300,000 IT professionals in the country and the 80,000 students passing out of IT courses every year, it'll surely classify as a sticky site (that is, visitors spend a lot of time on the site). Since it's so focused, ITspace.com has a lower customer-acquisition cost and can generate more revenue per member.

However, before getting into these specifics, websites need to take care of the basics. "It's important to make a user's journey through your site as pleasant and painless as possible," says Alok Kejriwal of contest2win.com His motto is "three clicks": if in three clicks of the mouse the visitor cannot reach what he's looking for, you've lost him. "The Net is no longer about ideas but execution," says Venkat Ramaswamy director, Edelweiss Capital, which raises funds for net ventures.

How do you do that? Faster is one way. Khel.com, for instance, is reputed for its quick log-on and the quicker score tally. Cricket.org's also made the effort and despite the 200,000 pages of cricket-related content, it compares favourably.

And don't forget marketing and promotion. Sites like indiainfo.com have reportedly spent about 3-3.5 crore in the last three months on advertising. That's just the global tent. In the US, dotcoms reportedly accounted for 33 per cent of millennium-related adspend. It's early days yet but it's obvious that the Indian surfer's going to be a difficult suitor to woo. Any guesses on which sites will be winning the popularity sweepstakes next year?

METHODOLGY THE Outlook-MDRA survey of Indian website was carried out in six cities-the four metros, Bangalore and Hyderabad-amount 569 regular Net users. Of the respondents, 10 percent were housewives and 20 per cent teenagers. The rest were salaried or self-employed professionals. Respondents were first asked the ways they used the Internet. E-mail emerged the most important, with new and current affairs second, followed by entertainment, chat and business and finance. According to importance of usage, these areas of interest were then allotted weightages. Respondents were then asked to list Indian sites they liked the most. Further information was obtained on how much time they spent at these sites at a stretch: less than 15 minutes, 15 to 30 minutes, or more than 30 minutes. Respondents were also asked how often they visited the sites: frequently (once a week or more), some-times (once a fortnight or month), rarely (less than once a month). The final rankings were calculated by also combining the unaided recall of the website's name