Orkuting most popular Internet activity among Indians

NET EFFECT: Online matrimonial search has become a 'mainline' online activity in India.

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New Delhi: What do Indians do when they are hooked on to the Net?

Most of them are either busy writing or receiving emails, dating online or socialising on networking sites like Orkut

That’s the finding of India Online 2007, an Internet users’ behaviour survey conducted by online research solutions consultancy firm JuxtConsult.

According to the findings of the survey, online matrimonial search has established itself as a 'mainline' online activity in India with almost half the online urban Indians (48 per cent) undertaking it.

“Over 12 million online urban Indians are using online matrimonial search, making it the 13th most popular online activity. It has also been one of the biggest 'gainers' in users among the online activities in last one year,” the survey reports.

“Almost 60 per cent of users of both the online activities are common, i.e. 37 per cent of all Internet users undertake both online matrimony and online dating/friendship," the survey conducted to understand the Internet users in the country adds.

"This is significantly higher than last year, when only 9 per cent of all Internet users undertook both the activities. In comparison to matrimony, dating/friendship is a more popular online activity with 51 per cent net users undertaking it and it ranks 10th in terms of popularity."

The latest entrant, social networking sites like Orkut, Facebook among others have already rallied up 44 per cent of the Internet time with over 11 million Indians getting hooked to it.

Giving a demographic profile of Internet users in the country, the survey points out that South India leads the online activity with 39 per cent of all net users coming from South.

The survey, which was conducted both online and offline covering more than 36,000 respondents from 31 cities spread across the country says, "The popularity of online matrimonial search has really surged in last one year. Last year, the percentage of all net users undertaking matrimonial search was only 15 per cent."

At 48 per cent usage level now, the category has seen an addition of a 33 per cent of all net users joining the category in this year.

"There is no denying that matrimonial websites are now gaining prominence if we go by the number of people who register with us. We are making it easier for them by bringing out vernacular matrimonial websites which is attracting a large section of the online matrimonial search users," Uday Zokarkar, Business Head of Bharatmatrimony Centre, says.

Another activity which is the second most preferred by online users is job search. Searching jobs online is no more limited to big cities and only four out of 10 online job seekers in urban India come from the top 10 metro cities, the survey adds.

A majority of 61 per cent of online job seekers come from non-metro towns — 31 per cent belonging to smaller non-metro towns and 30 per cent from the larger non-metros, it reveals.

The top three most preferred activities by online users as per the survey are emailing (95 per cent), job search (73 per cent) and instant messaging (62 per cent).

(With PTI inputs)