BIGADDA

» see bigadda.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

bigadda never reached turkey at meaningful scale. it was an india-specific reliance product, launched in 2007 with the goal of being the indian-language answer to orkut, which by then was already dominant on the subcontinent. the anchor content was a daily blog by amitabh bachchan, the bollywood superstar whose presence was meant to give the platform credibility in a market reliance did not yet own.

reliance entertainment, the arm of the anil ambani group behind it, put real money into the launch. rajesh sawhney was the president running the thing. the userbase climbed to about three million by november 2008, which was respectable for an indian social network in that window but small next to orkut india, which was already running in the tens of millions.

the social network shut on 6 july 2011. anyway, an email went to users asking them to download their blog posts and images by 15 july. reliance announced the pivot the same day, the bigadda domain would be repurposed as a shopping portal and the social-networking part of the product was being wound down. industry reports put the cumulative loss at rs 40 crore, which was the stated reason.

the timing tracked with google plus launching the week before, on 28 june 2011, which made the indian social network market look even more crowded than it already was. with orkut still strong and facebook accelerating its hindi and tamil push, reliance picked the moment to walk away.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was ~

the technical setup was an opensocial-compliant platform with photo uploads and shared blogs at its core. there was nothing wildly novel about the feature list. in those days. the marketing positioning was 'india's own social network', a familiar pitch in countries where the dominant global SN at the time felt american by default.

the amitabh bachchan blog was the only piece of content most outside observers ever mentioned. bachchan kept it for years and used it as a personal column. when the SN closed in 2011 the blog moved to a standalone microsite at bigb.bigadda.com and kept running for several more years before he migrated his audience to twitter and instagram like everyone else.

~ what killed it ~

the india social-network market in 2009 to 2011 had orkut and facebook from outside, plus a handful of local attempts. ibibo, fropper, minglebox, and apnacircle were the visible ones. each had a parent telco or media company behind it. none of them found enough product fit to push past the global incumbents once those incumbents got their hindi and tamil localizations right.

the 40 crore figure is what reliance let leak through industry coverage as the cumulative loss on the social-network business. by 2011 the comfort with running money-losing social experiments had run out for indian conglomerates. reliance kept the bigadda domain alive but repointed it at a different problem, which is what most companies in that position did. the social part ended that july and the brand became a shopping site.

~ the long tail ~

amitabh bachchan's blog outlived the parent platform by years. the microsite kept publishing through the early teens before the bachchan posts moved to twitter, where the indian celebrity bandwidth had concentrated. the bigadda brand as a shopping property faded too, and the domain has bounced through different owners since. what survives is a wikipedia stub and the screenshots of bachchan posts that made bigadda briefly the most-quoted indian SN of the late aughts.

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