Indians love Orkut but Facebook is soon catching up. We all knew it…now it is official. 

A recently released report by comScore on top social networking sites in India, suggests that Orkut is the most visited social networking site in India, as of December 2008. The site has more than 12.8 million visitors, and has seen an increase of 81 percent vis-à-vis the previous year. Now if you think 81% is phenomenal, read further. Facebook, the world’s largest social networking site, is at the number 2 spot with 4 million visitors from India. However, the growth Facebook has seen dwarfs even Orkut.  At 150% growth, Facebook is likely to catch up with Orkut very soon.  

One very interesting revelation made in the report is the visitor base of Bharatstudent.com. It is the 3^rd most popular networking site with 3.3 million visitors (up by 88 percent). On the other hand the much advertised and publicized ibibo.com and BIGADDA.com are not fairing too well. Looks like the initial spurt of activity triggered by the massive scale media activity has now fizzled out.  

Some of the other figures given in the report indicate an overall increase of 51% in the number of unique visitors to the social networking sites in India. The number stands at 19 million visitors as of December 2008…an extraordinary 60% of the total Indian internet traffic!!

Take a look at the table below for details: