InMobi Rates India As The Largest Mobile Ad Market in Asia Pacific Region

InMobi released a network research report that takes a look at mobile advertising patterns between July and October, 2010 in India and the Asia Pacific region. It has released reports on United States and European Union too but our focus is on India and Asia Pacific.

InMobi’s Global Research and Marketing Vice President, James Lamberti said, “The Indian mobile advertising market continues to show rapid growth due to the improving ad ecosystem. Major publishers are bringing their media into the mobile channel while brands are simultaneously recognizing the power of mobile advertising. This healthy ecosystem along with 3G network infrastructure improvements will place India amongst the most influential mobile markets on the globe”.

InMobi claims the data to have been sourced from its mobile advertising network that served 24.1 billion impressions across the world in October 2010. Let us observe its findings about the APAC region.

• There was a growth of around 1 billion mobile ad impressions in 3 months, that is, around 8.7%.
• The major increases in the smartphone impressions was due to Apple’s iPhone
• Only 10% of the global mobile ad ecosystem is represented by smartphones in Asia.
• Nokia-Symbian had the maximum percentage of Operating Systems impressions. It was followed by iPhone and Android. Windows Mobile and Rim together represented less than 1% of the impressions.
• Nokia, amongst handsets, had the largest share but faced a drop of 4% over the 3 months period. Samsung stood 2^nd with an addition of 2% while Sony Ericsson came 3^rd with a drop of 3%. Apple saw an increase of 7.7%.
• iPhone had maximum number of impressions as a single handset, but 17 out of 20 top handsets were Of Nokia.

The findings about India were as follows,

• India is at present the single biggest mobile ad impression market in Asia Pacific. Over the three month period it saw an increase of 22%. According to InMobi, this is because many local advertisers and publishers had opted the medium. It is a viable compliment to television as an advertising medium, concludes InMobi.

• Smartphones share a very low percentage of these impressions. iOS and Android together have a share of 0.4%. 2011 is expected to see a continuous rise in the share of smartphones.
• In India too Nokia-Symbian continues to have the largest Operating System impressions of 65%. Windows Mobile, iPhone and Android had only 0.2% each.
• In single handsets Nokia had around 65% impressions like the Operating Systems’ impressions. Unlike the complete region, Nokia saw an increase of 0.5% in India.  Samsung handsets had nearly 20% of the impressions with a rise of 2% while Sony Ericsson saw a drop of 1%.
• 12 out of top 15 and 9 out of top 10 handsets were of Nokia. The other three were manufactured by Samsung.

Indian Market represents a duality in many cases. A number of Press around the world is accounting of the reduction in the impressions of Nokia but it continues to be doing good in India. Android was expected to have overshadowed Nokia. India being stated as the largest Mobile Ad Market is a little exaggeration as China and Japan, which surely have more impressions than India, were not included in the report. Still, the count of impressions is fascinating and will definitely rise in the future.