I recently saw gaana.com’s print ad on a major daily which mentioned about the humongous traffic the site is getting. Although i knew that gaana.com has become fairly popular, especially among the youth, but the number mentioned on the ad was way too high. So I did my little search and was shocked when i saw the same on the ad planner. Gaana.com was actually generating huge traffic and not only that but most of them were returning visitors. The website, concept, brand and everything had done the trick, after all even I was a regular visitor of the site till the time it wasnt blocked at my office 🙁
But the fact that a new site has grown so big in such small time made me uneasy. So I did some analysis and asked myself why at the first place I am addicted to gaana.com. I am just a normal user and if they have made me a loyal visitor they must have made countless others.
Here is my take on why gaana.com has become one of the most visited site in India.
1) Muzik is the only unhated thing in the world(perhaps hated only by taliban) – You love music, I love music, he loves music and she definitely loves music. We all love music and we want to listen to songs at some point in our day. Whats remarkable with music is that we can listen to songs and do other stuffs at the same time(cooking, running, coding(for sure)) so gaana.com had a huge market obviously.
2) The power of cloud – So here are two friends. One is smartypants and another one is douchebag. They both get an itch to listen to the song “Kahe to se sajana yeh teri sajaniya..” from Salman’s most rocking movie ever – Maine Pyar Kiya. Douchebag has the perfect plan and says ” hey i can go to xyz.com and search for this song, right click and save, wait for a couple of mins and then play this song on my awesome player” to which smarty pants replies “or else you can go to gaana.com search for the song and play. You dont have to wait till it downloads and you can play it in office, school and other freedom sucking places”. Douchebag – ‘Dude, why do u call me douchebag?’
3) The power of buffering speed: What good would this site be if you plugged on your earphones, clicked on the song and waited? May be the song started and when the ‘mukhda’ got finished the ‘antra’ got hunged? Obviously you wont return back to it ever. But at gaana.com the buffering speed is fantastic(I know it depends on the connection you have but still the buffering speed at gaana.com is good to great).
4) The power of Brand – Gaana.com is owned by the times group. The good thing about having such a brand behind you is the boost it gives to your marketing efforts. Gaana.com had countless ads on other websites. Whats remarkable is that since they were owned by the times group they displayed gaana.com ad on timeofindia.com which is a well reputed highly visited site. You get so many visitors and you also get a backlink from a national daily’s website. The big brand also helps in killing smaller players serving the same market.
5) No downloads allowed at office and educational institutions: –
Manager: ‘You are suppose to work at this esteemed organization’.
You: ‘You are suppose to pay me for my work’
The fact is we work but there is no harm in having a break and go through some email fwds while listening to the chartbuster of the week. I do it everyday! Same at colleges and schools. Since we cannot downloads songs at our office/lab PC, gaana.com comes real handy.
Do you think there are other reasons for ganna.com’s popularity? Let me know through the form below.