The startup’s user base continues to grow rapidly. From just 300 thousand monthly unique users last year, biNu has grown to an estimated 3.7 million monthly unique users in March 2012. Page view wise growth has been nothing short of impressive too; in September last year when we last wrote about their growth, biNu was getting about 150 million page views a month globally. Compare that to the March 2012’s estimate of 443 million page views. A threefold increase!
biNu’s top country remains India which registered some 68.1 million page views last month. It’s followed by Nigeria, Ethiopia and Zimbabwe and Indonesia in that order with 36.8M, 23.9M, 23.1M and 16.3M page views respectively. Egypt, which used to be one of the top biNu using countries last year, is nowhere in the top 10 now.
On the apps front, no prizes for guess what the top biNu app is. It’s Facebook. Followed by Google Search. Other top 10 apps include biNu Messenger, Google Translate, News, YouTube and Twitter.
In Zimbabwe, the top 5 apps are Facebook, Facebook messenger, News, biNu Messenger and Google Search in that order.
Curiously though, the growth of page views in Zimbabwe has significantly slowed down. From 22 million page views in August 2011, Zimbabwean users on the platform now only viewed 23.1 million pages in February 2012. To understand how serious a slow down that is, consider that the 22 million pages views in August 2011 were, according to biNu at that time, from a near zero user base just 5 months earlier.
It’s hard to explain the slow down, so we’ll have biNu tell us this one. But before they do that, a little speculation: It may partly be a result of the rapid adoption of WhatsApp as a means to communicate short messages. It may also be that low cost Android mobile phones are starting to eat into the market once dominated by cheap Asian imports sold in the country mainly by G-Tide (renamed G-Telecoms). Remember the two companies had a deal to have a white label biNu on every G-Tide sold.
You can view the full stats here: binu.com/usage-statistics
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Zimbabwe’s not that bad, actually doing good
[…] explosive growth over the past year, having achieved over 4.2 million unique users in August. Its usage statistics point to India as its top country, which registered some 68.1 million page views earlier this year. […]