moneycontrol.com completes 15 years in India

moneycontrol.com, the financial portal from the Network 18 Group, has completed 15 years of existance recently. The website's birth coincided with the worldwide dotcom boom in the late 90s when investors and users were still not clear as to what this new beast called internet was all about.

moneycontrol today gets over 17 million unique visitors every month across all its platforms-web, mobile and tablets. The website's portfolio tracker today has around 2.5 million users, and its message board gets around 30,000 messages every weekday on an average.

Says Santosh Nair, editor, moneycontrol.com, "It gives us immense pride to say that many of the features and other offerings have been shaped by user feedback, be it as something as simple as the position of a 'print' icon on a web page, or some complex data relating to futures and options. At moneycontrol, we take user feedback seriously, and that is also one of the reasons that we have managed to constantly evolve over time."

The company feels that despite the rapid growth in internet user base, India is still a long way off both in terms of the penetration of internet as well as bandwidth, when compared to developed countries. The total internet user base in the country is around 245 million, according to a recent study by the Internet and Mobile Association of India, which translates into roughly 20 per cent penetration, compared to 70-80 per cent in developed economies. This and the fact that financial awareness in the country and the proportion of savings that goes into capital markets are way too low, means a huge potential for growing the number of moneycontrol users.

Nair fyrther adds that having come this far, it will be our endeavor to stay a step ahead in the game "We look forward to our users' continued support and suggestions that will help us improve our offering," he says.