In response to an interview with Arun Tadanki, president and managing director, Monster.com India, where Tadanki has stated that Monster.com India is bigger than Naukri.com, Sanjeev Bikhchandani, co-founder and chief executive officer, Naukri.com, has stated that the Monster claim is false and that Naukri.com is much larger.

Following is the Naukri.com response to the interview:

Dear Sir,

I read the Rediff Interview of October 6, 2006, of Mr. Arun Tadanki where he claimed that Monsterindia is bigger than Naukri.com.

I would like to point out certain facts which Mr. Tadanki omitted to mention in his interview. These omissions may create an erroneous impression among your visitors that Naukri.com lags behind Monsterindia in traffic and resumes.

Actually Naukri.com is almost twice as big as Monsterindia.

On February 19th 2006, Monsterindia changed its resume registration form. Job seekers who had registered using the old form over the past several years were told to upgrade to the new form by filling out extra fields.

Those who did were tagged as new resumes and not as modified or updated. Hence there was an unnatural blip in the new resumes acquired by Monsterindia, many of which were actually not new but old resumes that had been modified.

As time went by and fewer and fewer people migrated from the old resume form of Monsterindia to the new form the new resume acquisition rate of Monsterindia declined by over 25% in the last quarter while Naukri.com grew by around 20% in the same period. This is corroborated by the figures printed in the original interview in Business Standard.

Once there is nobody who is left to migrate from the Monsterindia old resume form we expect the new resume acquisition figures of both Monsterindia and Naukri.com to more or less mirror traffic share, as it did till January 2006. Naukri.com currently gets over 8,000 new resumes each day.

We estimate that Monsterindia gets around 4,000 new resumes a day (if you remove old resumes that are migrating to the new resume form and tagged as new).

So what is the traffic share of these two sites?

On Alexa, the Naukri.com reach is around 1,500 while the Monsterindia reach is around 850. This makes us around 75% larger than Monsterindia on reach. As Mr. Tadanki mentioned Naukri.com does have pop-ups, however they do not inflate the reach figures of a site on Alexa since they are not counted as extra visitors.

You do need the Alexa toolbar to be downloaded on your browser for you to be counted, however over 10 million Alexa toolbars have been downloaded making it a large and reliable sample. Alexa data is reliable when you measure ranks and traffic share.

On Comscore Mediametrix which is the other independent traffic measurement system, in August 2006, Naukri.com had a traffic share of 57%, while Monsterindia and Jobsahead combined were around 34%. The average visitor spent 31 minutes on Naukri.com as compared to 18 minutes on Monsterindia.

Recently Juxtconsult did a survey of over 25,000 Internet users and sought their preferences. Over 49% of the respondents said that Naukri.com is their most preferred job site as compared to 19% for Monsterindia.

A blog search on Google for Naukri.com gives over 90,000 finds whereas Monsterindia gives 1,500 matches. Clearly many more people are talking about Naukri.com -- we have a higher share of mind.

Monsterindia claims 11,500 clients in the last one year. Naukri.com had around 20,000 in the last financial year.

We have over 80,000 job listings on our site as compared to Monsterindia which has 35,000.

Clients acknowledge the superior value delivered by Naukri.com by paying us more. Our price for a two month job listing is over Rs 3,400 as compared to Rs 2,000 for Monsterindia (we charge Rs 1,700 approximately for a one month listing).

The truth is that any way you slice the data Naukri.com is almost twice as big as Monsterindia.

Regards,

Sanjeev Bikhchandani
Co Founder and CEO
Naukri.com