Yahoo India has decided to shut down SpotM, the social network it launched less than a year ago in India. According to the site, SpotM. which never exited private beta, will be shut down on Sep. 1. Yahoo launched SpotM as a social network for the 16-24 age bracket in an attempt to capture the growing market in India.
It appeared that SpotM had potential to take off due the popularity of social networks in India and the addition of a few differentiating features. Yahoo said that SpotM would allow users to make friends with other users and if they wanted, to make those friends private so other users wouldn’t know about the relationship. SMS integration with anonymous chat would let users correspond via SMS without revealing their phone number.
But it appears that SpotM couldn’t compete with other social networks that are dominating in India. Google’s Orkut is the leader in the space, with 16 million unique visitors in July, according to comScore stats. Facebook, which is growing incredibly fast in India, reached a high of 7.5 million unique visits in India, according to July’s comScore numbers. In May, Facebook launched availability for several Indian languages including Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil and Malayalam. Perhaps Yahoo is planning to focus its social networking efforts in other parts of the world with the recently launched Yahoo Meme.
Thanks to Ashish Sinha for the tip.
Private beta? Assuming that means that only certain people can use it, that might be their problem. If I can’t invite all my friends and they can’t use it, what’s the point? Facebook is popular because of the amount of people that use it.
A new innovative move from Yahoo India. Upto now Yahoo was used as a good search engine and as email database in India. I think Yahoo is also very eager to enter into the the social networking team through SpotM with exciting features such as private Beta and SMS integration.
We shall wait and see the performance of spotM and to which extent they can recover the Indian population from Orkut and FaceBook?
Tonto say, bfd. Use smoke from fire.
wow and five years ago india’s market
because of the demographics
wanted to Boom
Guess its part of consolidation of overlapping projects. Yahoo 360 plus is very popular in south east asian countries as such.
Leena,
Just like there were more online travel agents than the airlines operator during the mad rush of mid-2000s, the same thing was repeated for Social Networks.
Considering that there are only 40m “active” (definition of active is a dilution in itself) net users, having more social networks than the number of states in India is a difficult business proposition — and with international brands dominating, it’s hard for a local network to fly.
Leena – something to think about – over 50% of Indian Internet users can be found on social networking and photo & video sharing sites .. read it here http://bit.ly/H8KxY
Leena – not sure about how completely on the mark Comscore is about tracking India’s audience. You might want to see July site stats for India here – http://vizisense.com/dashboard
yahoo is very popular!is not a big lost for this monster
I use YAHOO to see news everyday ,I like Yahoo,I think yahoo is more important than google
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