Around 40% of the traffic that Kannada daily Udayavani gets online is coming from Facebook, Ravi Hegde, Group Editor of Udayavani said at the #NAMA event "The Digital Future of Indic Languages" event last week. Sriram Hebbar, CEO of Greynium Information Technologies (OneIndia) pointed out that while 60% of the traffic for their English section comes from Google*, for the Indian language sites, it is only 20%. Most of their traffic for Indian languages is direct, followed by Facebook. Another challenge Hebbar mentioned is that Google News doesn't always surface their language content well enough - "The days our article is on top, we get sizable traffic. Some days it goes up, some days it doesn't. We don't depend on Google News, even though we work with their team. Kannada does not have Google News. It started and stopped. For the rest of the languages, it is seasonal." Hebbar said that searchability as critical for Indic languages to grow in India, because searchability leads to traffic, which leads to revenue. At the same time, searchability has improved over the years. BG Mahesh, MD of OneIndia, added that with the improvements in fonts and crawling of Indic language sites, search referrals are still better than earlier, but "not anywhere close to where it should be," a point also mentioned by Mariam Mathew, COO, Manorama Online. Gaurav Bhaskar, a Google spokesperson, mentioned that the Google search team has been working on improving searchability over the last couple of years, adding that "there…
