LEADING THE MOBILE INTERNET – A QUIZ

By Yuszela Yusoff, Manager, Content & Community

What is the biggest market for mobile advertising and mobile social networking? I’ll give you five choices:
1. China
2. India
3. The United States
4. Indonesia
5. Nigeria

No peeking.

Before you scroll down, let me give you a few hints:

• Nearly half of our surveyed users in this country list the media (movies, TV, music and fashion) as activities that they really enjoy.
• More than half of the respondents to our survey in this country own or are considering buying a computer, printer or computer peripherals.
  
• Six mobile operators there were found guilty of price fixing last month. They illegally collaborated on the price of text messages (SMS).
• Intense competition between telecom carriers resulted in a spike in consumer usage.
• But increased usage overloaded the network. Voice calls were not always connected and mobile web pages and banners didn’t load properly.
• Renewed investment in mobile infrastructure by this country’s telcos has rectified the problem and once again created a reliable telecom system.

OK, the first two clues really aren’t very good as they’re true across the myGamma network. As for #4-6, this helps narrow it down as only a few countries in our quiz have seen intense price competition recently. Here are a few more facts and figures about myGamma users in the country in question:

• 76 percent are male (versus 60 percent on average across our network).
• 25 percent have graduated university.
• 78 percent have tertiary education or higher.
• 40 percent are between the ages of 20-25.
• More than 70 percent are aged 20-30.
• 22 percent expect to get married within the next 6 – 12 months, more than twice the network average.
• Most earn less than US$11k per year.
• Only 11 percent earn more than US$27k annually.
• But e-commerce and m-commerce is taking root. About 20 percent have made a purchase using a mobile phone. Another 23 percent have bought something online from a PC.
• The country’s best hope of earning a gold medal in the Olympic Games rests with its Badminton team.

OK, have you narrowed down the choices? Or have you gone online to google which country recently found telcos guilty of price fixing? Hopefully you haven’t scrolled too far down to see the answer. Here it is: Indonesia. The world’s most populous Muslim country is also at the forefront of the mobile internet. (I’m going to hold back from calling our quiz answer by name in the rest of this blog entry as I don’t want scanning eyes to spoil the fun, so please bear with me as I refer to it as Country #1.)

Our winning country has topped the BuzzCity Mobile Advertising Index for the past two surveys. In the second quarter of this year, we served more than 1.2 billion ads here, up 85 percent from Q1. Just 17 months ago, I wrote that AdMob had served 1.6 billion ads worldwide. Country #1 alone is now closing in on that figure.

In addition to ads, there’s a second reason Country #1 is at the forefront of the mobile internet. 63 percent of mobile browser traffic here is directed to social networking sites, according to Opera, the web and mobile browsing company, which recently studied its mobile server logs. This is the highest percentage in the world, tied with the United States. The global average, according to Opera, is about 40 percent.

There are currently more than 170,000 myGamma users in Country #1 and another thousand are joining the community every day. About 40 percent live in the capital city but others are located in remote areas. When asked what additional mobile service they wished they had, some 20 percent answered “chat and dating services” – a higher percentage than in any other country included in our survey.

Frequent readers of this blog know that this year we’ve started featuring different user-generated content on myGamma each month. There’s a standard feature page in English that can be viewed across most of our network. There are also localised pages. Next month, we roll out our third localised edition, this one in Bahasa Indonesia for our Country #1 readers. (The first two localised feature pages are in India and Thailand). The theme each month on localised pages is the same as on the international ones, but the comments and posts are not. In August, to coincide with the 2008 Olympic Games, our theme is Sports, Health & Fitness. Expect the focus in Country #1 to be on their Badminton team, which has sent eleven shuttlers to China, half of the country’s Olympic delegation. Good luck!!