Category: Apps

The country is already the fastest growing market for smartphones and is now leading in ad earnings.

India has now become the top APAC (Asia Pacific) market in terms of the speed of growth of smartphone ownership and with that, the country has now risen to the point in which it is also leading in the area of revenues generated through mobile advertising.

This trend is being credited to a considerable change in the country’s online marketplace due to smartphone ownership.

A rapidly growing number of mobile device owners have turned away from their old feature phones and have purchased smartphones in order to be able to take advantage of a whole range of additional features. That said, digital marketing trends in the country are also pushing a rising number of marketers, retailers, entrepreneurs and even filmmaker to look to mobile advertising in order to reach this growing number of consumers who don’t go anywhere without their smartphones.

A new report has shown that in India, the mobile advertising opportunities are rising to an astronomical level.

The Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) and Opera Media Works have released the results of their Q3 State of Mobile Advertising research in which they discovered that “In India, 75% mobile users have smartphones. Even in markets where the transition from feature phones to smartphones has been slower (Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines), about half of the mobile user base has moved to smartphones.”

Furthermore, among the smartphone based users of the global mobile ad platform from Opera among s6 countries in the APEC region, it was found that the top operating system among smartphone owners is Android, with a massive 67.1 percent market share of mobile ad impressions.

Dr. VIkas Gulati from Opera Mediaworks Asia explained that in terms of mobile advertising, it is video ads that are truly paving the way for monetization throughout the APAC region. That format is drawing attention, engaging people and is “ultimately converting consumers.” Gulati added that “India leads in over all traffic and the top three categories for ad impressions are Mobile stores and career portals, social networking sites and apps, and sports.”

This trend is heading around the world as Diwali shopping in India broke mobile records.

While the holiday shopping season is only just getting started in the United States, India has already had a major wave of its own m-commerce season as Diwali brought a tremendous number of shoppers to their device screens to pick up that perfect gift.

According to UCWeb, the holiday shopping traffic across India broke the 75.5 percent mark this year.

UCWeb is the company behind the top mobile browser used in India, as it holds onto a market share that is greater than 54 percent in that country. This makes that company uniquely able to understand the increases that are being seen in m-commerce activities throughout the year and at times of holiday shopping such as during Diwali.

According to the company’s managing director in India, Kenny Ye, “The numbers of users who visit Flipkart, Amazon and Snapdeal via UC Browser in the month leading up to Diwali 2015 increased over 75 percent compared with last year.”

People in India are steadily increasing their use of m-commerce, particularly during festive seasons.

Ye went on to explain that consumers in India are “embracing shopping on the go” to a growing degree. They are finding that there is a great deal of opportunity available to take advantage of the time they have while they commute or on lunch breaks, for example, in order to pick up the gifts they need for festive celebrations. It helps them to save time and to be able to find some great ways to save money on what they want to buy.

That said, this use of mobile commerce for Diwali in India has been met with some resistance in that many people are saying that it is pushing people to think of this important time on the calendar in an exclusively commercial sense, when it is supposed to mean a great deal more.

This closely mirrors the sentiment of many people who will be using m-commerce to help them to get ahead in their Christmas shopping during the holiday season in the United States. It will be interesting to see what other trends follow the same paths between the two countries and their top gift giving holidays.