comScore revelaed its latest stats on Indian social networking sites yesterday. Orkut and Facebook took the first two spots, understandably. The third was BharatStudent.com – in fact, according to these figures by comScore, they’ve doubled their traffic in 12 months! Is it that spammer website that posts porn videos so often? Did they get to this list, ahead of hi5, ibibo, myspace and linkedin thanks to all the spam on Orkut? Some achievement, that! There are quite a few stories about BharatStudent and its dubious ways on the net.
Here’s one. And another. I recall seeing unnecessary pop-up windows with BharatStudent ads while I click on links in Orkut. What is BharatStudent’s (BS? That sounds apt?) modus operandi? How did they reach this position? And most importantly, who the heck uses it?
Amongst the other Indian social networking sites, looks like ibibo has kicked its own balti (huh? and more huh?) – their traffic is down by 50%. The Indian verdict is out – balls to balti, I guess. BigAdda, despite that non-stop chatter from the Big B himself seems to be struggling, but good to see growth in MySpace and LinkedIn’s traffic. Perhaps the most surprising growth is that of hi5, at No. 4, with a whopping 182% growth! Hmmm, need to activate my hi5 account!