Just wanted to clear up some information regarding use of Similarweb for insights. Just use it with a pinch of salt as these stats (free version) are not very accurate, especially for the Indian market. Some of the reasons are:
- The Traffic sources mentioned above is valid only for traffic originating in “desktop” and doesn’t include mobile, when in India, traffic sources are heavily skewed in favour of mobile due to smartphone revolution and cheap data boom last 4-5 years.
- Mobile usually contributes to more than 90% of traffic in most cases. Even conservatively, very rare to see desktop traffic cross 15-20% in India across genres.
- Indiamart also has more than 10 Million installs of their app on mobile ( source: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.indiamart.m ) and thats a LOT for a primarily B2B app. This ensures a lot of traffic comes from mobile.
- The “visits” figure in Similarweb doesn’t refer to “unique user”. So, when the same user “visits” 3 times a month, its counted as 3 visits rather than 1 unique user. So 10 Million+ installs on app, plus heavy skew of mobile usage in India, means we can not use the “Desktop” data to make any generalisation regarding “direct” traffic vs “search traffic” for unique users (which is the stronger metric in digital).
- Even the “search” data, if you do a deep analysis of the keywords, you may find a larger chunk of them being “brand” keywords like “indiamart”, “india mart”, “indiamart login”, “indiamart seller”, “indianmart buyer” and so on. This means the searches are more “navigational” and no different than “direct” traffic as far as Indiamart’s brand strength is concerned. The web browsers have ensured users don’t type the full “www. xyz. com” anymore.
Even after all this, Indiamart ranks very very high in Google search results for its category. This itself is a huge MOAT, as it s very very tough to unseat rankings when one of the variables Google uses is “history” and Indiamart has a very good score. When your traffic is growing, and you have massive depth in your site across categories, and results are relevant to keywords, your ranking doesn’t change much unless you screw up big time.
Net net, I don’t think we can come to a conclusion that demand side network effects are not dominant.
In fact, it might be the opposite in the b2b category.
Now all that being said, the current share price of Indiamart at Rs 6000+ is making me feel dizzy.
Disc: I did ride the rally from 2000 to 4500 and exited as I felt it was very high.