Online classifieds Industry in India – Naukri & Shaadi.com lead the way

I wrote earlier on how everybody is quitting naukri as well as getting married; and recently released comscore data (for the period of Feb-July ’07) of leading players in the online classifieds Industry in India just proves the point.
Here are a few interesting excerpts from the report (which estimates the no. of Internet users in India to be 23 million)

Online classified Industry: Jobs

• Naukri.com leads the way (3.8 mn unique visitors)- which essentially means that not everybody is quitting naukri!
• Timesjobs witnessed highest jump (38%) and looks like their “everybody quitting naukri” campaign worked well.
• Monster.com stands at a steady state and is the no. 2 visited job site.

Summary:

• Online job search market is highly dominated by a few big players.
• Fifth most popular job site’s traffic = 10% of the no.1 site and that itself says that
  • either there is a huge gap and maybe, a big opportunity?
  • or maybe, it’s too difficult to break in?

Online classified Industry: Marriage sites

• Shaadi.com leads the way, but is registering a decline in the no. of unique visitors.
• JeevanSathi beats BharatMatrimony in terms of no. of unique visitors.
  
• Both Shaadi and Bharatmatrimony have seen a decline in unique visitors
• JeevanSaathi is the number 1 site, if you go by pageviews (119 mn vs. 49 million of Shaadi.com)

Summary:

• As is the case with Job sites, the industry is dominated by 4 players.
• The fifth player (jhoos.com) gets insignificant amount of traffic

Update:
According to BharatMatrimony, the data stated in this report doesn’t takes into account their regional portals. If one takes into account the regional portals, BM is a clear winner.
Lesson for BM: It’s time to consolidate the brands. Maybe BM should have regional portals as part of the main domain (i.e. BharatMatrimony.com/tamil should be a masked URL for tamilmatrimony.com..and so on)

Online classified Industry: Real Estate Industry

• BharatMatrimony owned IndiaProperty is the no. 1 site
• 99 acres.com is no. 1 in terms of page views.
• Yahoo’s real estate site doesn’t have anything to talk about.

Online classified Industry: Automobile segment

• Yahoo autos is the most visited site, followed very closely by carwale
• Carwale leads in terms of number of page views.
• BharatMatrimony’s IndiaAutomobile.com registered highest growth (181%) in the last 6 months.
• The total unique visitors for Ford.com was 153,000 in July 2007, followed by marutiudyog.com and marutisx4.com combined together at 144,000

Overall, the classifieds industry is dominated by four players; but I believe times will change (yes! there are a few startups working on very innovative concepts!)
Source: agencyfaqs, view the entire report here