MUMBAI: Google Inc. expects India‘s Internet users to triple by 2014. However, cashing in on this opportunity is a challenge as television and newspapers gobble a major chunk of advertising, a report said Friday.

Google‘s country head in India, Rajan Anandan, told the Wall Street Journal that the search giant predicts India reaching at least 300 million Internet users by 2014, up from about 100 million now.
 
With only eight per cent of the population having access to Internet, India already occupies the third position in terms of number of users, behind China and US.

"Despite a lot of the infrastructure challenges we have as a country, 100 million Indians are online," Anandan, a former Microsoft executive who took over Google‘s India operations in March, told the newspaper.
 
"They‘re spending a huge amount of time online and they‘re doing a varied set of things online."

"Making money off that growing audience, though, is proving difficult thus far for Google and other Internet companies," Anandan told the newspaper.