BigAdda.com A big Flop!!!
If you type BigAdda in google trends, you will find a graph for BigAdda. You will see a complete downward trend. If you look carefully, you will find that there is a sudden peak in the beginning. This corresponds to the ad shown shown on TV during the cricket series. Just to refresh your memory, the ad was something like, “Youth goes, Love goes, Luck goes, Children go, but friends stay!” Now, I was very impressed with the quality of ad and I thought BigAdda.com was some quality service or product. I jumped to my pc, got connected to the internet and eagerly typed BigAdda.com. After registering and mucking around the site I realized that BigAdda was just all hype with no real substance. All, the publicity given to BigAdda is simply a waste of money. The guys at reliance do not seem to know that the internet works mainly through word of mouth approach.
The graph for orkut at google trends will give us some insight on the way internet works. Here orkut shows exponential growth from from zero to the consistent peaks in search volumes it now currently generates.
The only way BigAdda will ever distinguish itself is by creating completely out of the box features to compete with established giants like Orkut.
Now cheaply copying orkut is definitely not the way to go!
There are basically, two ways by which any internet venture can become a hit.
1. Create something very wild, unique and innovative. The audience would do the rest for you.
2. Copy past successes like orkut, myspace, Facebook and introduce them into unclaimed markets like in a foreign country where these big players have not yet made a great impression. Or introduce this in a niche field so that like minded users aggregate together.
All in all, I believe that Reliance will scrap this project within the next few years.
Popularity: 11%
February 23rd, 2008 at 8:32 am
Why thinking of scrapping this in a few years. IMO it will be obsolete in a few months if Reliance doesn’t keep up with market trends. The market trend right now is Application Platforms on social networking sites, which only a few sites have (Facebook, Bebo and now OpenSocial supporters like MySpace, Orkut, Hi5, Plaxo, Flixter and others). An application platform actually benefits the site, since it gives the site a ‘lots-of-features’ look.
And the best thing for BigAdda to do would be to join the OpenSocial alliance to have an app platform, because most of the technical stuff is given away at the OpenSocial project, so this would reduce BigAdda’s work to only implementing it.
Looking from a local perspective, none of the local players Yaari, MingleBox, Fropper, etc have an application platform. Whoever comes up with an app platform first is going to be the winner in the local arena. Or else its only going to be a fight between equals. N number of people might signup and might never return to any of these sites (thats what I did with my BigAdda profile).
So lets see who steals the thunder with a beautiful app platform.
February 23rd, 2008 at 8:44 am
Why take Orkut?
A better example would be Kevin Ross’s new startup Pownce. Just go to compete.com and look at their graph. The graph rises steeply in just one month!!!
The graph is like around 0 to 250k visitors in just 30 days!!!
But sadly maybe that was just because of the buzz created around ‘Kevin Ross’. The graph then decreases steeply in the next months. Thats a lesson that celebs can’t control the fate of their startups with their fame and name. Reliance is a damn good example for that.
February 23rd, 2008 at 9:00 am
Yeah right! Lets see if “Kevin Ross” manages to create another “Digg” like site. Take Sabeer Bhatia, co-founder of hotmail. It was a sensational hit because of its usefulness. After he sold it to Microsoft, he never succeeded in creating another sensation. Just goes to show that you cannot succeed everytime.
February 23rd, 2008 at 7:53 pm
[…] like the Facebook platform). And that post coincidently matched my view (in the comment) in the previous post related to BigAdda’s flop show, that Indian Social Networking sites need to get ready to match Orkut’s offering or add […]
February 24th, 2008 at 9:29 pm
i dont feel reliance would ever scrap it coz thats not reliance then.. they dont scrap projects.. although big adda is a gr8 failure now but no one knows adding the right constituents in it might make it a success.. they seriously need to add some special feature into it and make some web publicities after that.. but yes “gr8 publicities can sell some products for some time, good products with no publicity sells after some time but only a gr8 product with some publicity sells all the time” said by me…..
February 27th, 2008 at 3:59 pm
Yeah ritwik!
So maybe they might succeed if they do it.
You are right. Reliance won’t scrap the project, atleast for their prestige sake
But I guess their move will be to acquire ay other successful social networking site and merge it with this flopshow
April 6th, 2008 at 9:37 pm
I remember my first time on this website. My friend and I were looking for something totally new, something we haven’t read or heard about. We were so tired of college, and didn’t have too much time to go out. And we found this site, and now we come ever day to read some cool information or to discuss something with other people. It’s interesting to hear different points of view!
April 9th, 2008 at 3:11 pm
my opinion maybe sounds weird, but why do you all write so serious comments? I mean, do you REALLY think it’s true? Why? What makes you think so? Please share your opinion.