Rupert Murdoch-run Global media conglomerate News Corporation brought its social networking website MySpace to India on Thursday
NEW DELHI: Rupert Murdoch-run Global media conglomerate News Corporation brought its social networking website MySpace to India on Thursday-- a market already bustling with the presence of international giants like Google's Orkut and Indian billionaire Anil Ambani group's Bigadda.com.
Like other players already present in the market, News Corp is also looking to attract the younger generation in India, which is home to world's youngest population with over half of its residents aged below 25 years, industry experts said.
Indicating towards its target audience, MySpace announced its India launch with a slogan "Rock with MySpace.com" and said was marking its entry into the country with performances by three rock bands in Mumbai, where all the registered users of the website would get a free pass.
Websites like MySpace, Orkut, Facebook and Bigadda allow the people to chat with each other and have already become a craze among the youngsters in India as well as in other parts of the world.
MySpace has over 110 million users in the US and is closely followed by Facebook.
Coinciding with MySpace's India launch, Biggadda.com said in a statement that a reversal of a trend in the Social Networking scenario was emerging where people from other countries such as Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Nepal, apart from the US, UK, UAE and European countries as well were joining the communities on its website.
This is against the common perception about global players dominating this market in India, Bigadda said.
"Over the last month it has been observed that a large number of users from the neighboring Asian countries are joining Bigadda and close to 25 per cent are women," it said.
The Indian site said that this could be due to women users considering security options a great concern before joining a social networking site and Bigadda is focused on the users' freedom to share ideas, thoughts, photos and videos with only the people whom they choose to communicate with.
This is something users want but do not find on many other global sites, it added.
"We are very pleased with the new trend observed over the last few weeks, with many Asian users coming onto the site and registering.
"What is most fascinating is that these are users who have become aware of Bigadda purely by way of our popularity; since only a small fraction of the total number are members by friend's requests. The rest have looked us up and joined Bigadda," the company's Chief Operating Officer Siddhartha Roy said.
Social networking sites are a growing trend in India and with the popularity of an Indian site among the Asian community; it could only be expected to get bigger and better, it said.
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