• The three month growth average for the InMobi network was 52%
• Egypt grew by the largest margin of 873%
• United Kingdom enters the top five country list



• Top five countries in terms of mobile traffic in the InMobi network are
  • India
  • Indonesia
  • South Africa
  • Thailand
  • United Kingdom

Handset and Manufacturer Data

• Nokia’s share of traffic continues to fall. Nokia phones now occupy 15 of the top 20 positions. SonyEricsson and Samsung phones are climbing up the charts.
• Nokia N90 dropped from 2nd to 6th position

Country Spotlight: India

• For the first time a non-Nokia phone made its entry into the top 10 handset list in India
  • Samsung SGH-E740 saw a sudden spike bringing it into the top 10 list replacing Nokia 3500c.
  • Nokia N90 fell in India as well from the 2nd to 5th position

  

• After a significant 8% drop in carrier share last month, Airtel stabilized this month

Country Spotlight: Indonesia

• Nokia 6300 share of traffic increased, making it the top handset model in Indonesia
  • Nokia 3110 classic and Nokia N70 also increased their traffic share
  • While some Nokia phones did see a jump in traffic, SonyEricsson K510i entered the charts knocking off Nokia 5300

  

• Indosat fell by 5%. The drop of 5% was distributed between the rest of the operators
  • Natrindo comes back into the chart after its disappearance last month

  

Country Spotlight: South Africa

• The Top 10 list saw some newbies - Motorola V360 and Samsung D900i.
• Among the manufacturers, Samsung saw a large jump of 8% in the last month.

Note : All data presented above is based on InMobi’s network traffic

They are young. They are all batchmates from IIT and they think they are on to something truly big – ads on mobile Internet. Meet mKhoj and its founders – Naveen Tewari, Amit Gupta and Abhay Singhal. What made them jump into it? In the late 1990s, the Internet was spreading rapidly and there was money to be made in developing sites that dominated the Internet such as Yahoo! and Google. The threesome wondered what opportunities India would offer in this space. The most significant revolution in our lives over the past decade is the use of mobile telephony. Mobile phones have reached every corner of India, even to areas where good roads have not reached. There are close to 200 million mobile-users in India today and millions are getting added each month. By 2010, the number could be 500 million. This revolution has opened up a host of opportunities for innovative players.

Tewari articulates the opportunity for mKhoj: “When we looked at our country, we saw that the PC penetration was low, the cost of owning PCs was high and there existed huge infrastructural problems. We knew that the Internet would not bypass India but that the opportunity would play out differently. It could be done through the mobile phones and not the traditional PC route. A lot of people disagreed with us, but that is how we saw things. We saw that mobile is a device which is in everyone’s hands. In fact, the way a mobile is used in India is very different from how it is used in the rest of the world. It is a primary device; it is a social status symbol; it is the first item that people buy and they spend disproportionately high amounts on the handsets. This was an important factor. The other factors were that the operators were spending more on the data; the quality of data is improving; speeds are improving and the cost of data is coming down.”

Tewari’s guess was right. The rate of Internet access via mobile has increased, especially in Tier-II and Tier-III cities where people do not have the resources to acquire a PC. While this was the big picture – the use of Internet via mobile phones – the question was how to travel the path to create an advertisement model for mobile Internet. “We did not want to be in the content provider segment. Rather, we wanted to be at the heart of the system; we wanted to be in the ad network space which sells ads on the Internet when people are surfing on their mobile phones. Ads are the only way that people make money on the Internet. We wanted to be that part of the value chain which is serving these ads on the Internet phone. The money lay in a space where we were the aggregators of ads. We have a sales force which goes out and gets the ads. We use our technology which is proprietary, unique and designed in a way that when you surf the Internet via the phone, depending upon the user profile, the ads would flash. The program is uniquely real-time and fine-tuned to such an extent that when two people surf the same site, the ads that would be flashed would vary depending on their profiles.”

The Model
mKhoj partners with a site and does not force itself as pop-ups. Neither does it send the SMS uniformly to all. It partners with the content providers who share their space with mKhoj, which collects advertisement money and shares it with the site owners, while the advertisers are able to reach the right target audience. mKhoj has partnered with 300 sites so far. It recently did a campaign with Reebok, and Tewari claims that Reebok was elated with the result. “They got an excellent brand recall and reached the right audiences – youngsters who are their potential customers. Our technology can fine-tune an offering to such an extent that you see a product, identify the store closest to you and you can purchase it. We are just scratching the surface of the utilisation of this technology.” Tewari and his team claim that advertisers are also tired of doing the same hoardings and ads on television soaps without being able to reach their target audience. Now, they are able to reach their exact target audience all the time. “Unlike advertisements on hoardings and television, ads on the mobile rarely get missed. As the screen is small, the ad reaches out to you. The interaction on the mobile Internet is also a prolonged one,” they say.

Until now, mKhoj has been attracting a certain kind of advertiser. Since mobile Internet advertising is a new medium, it is used by companies which are more youth-oriented and technology-savvy. But mKhoj has bigger plans. Says Amit Gupta, VP business development: “The mobile advertising market has not even started to develop. We are currently in WAP and SMS-based advertising and are trying to get in more features, value-addition and various services which we can offer. Other than providing pure services, we are assisting our clients to reach effectively and study the results of advertising.”

Beyond that, mKhoj wants to be a global player. It believes that its model will work well in certain countries. The mobile market is huge in India and China, but not in the rest of the world. “In the US, Internet usage developed via the PC which the rest of the world adopted. Similarly, we have Internet usage story via the mobile, which we would take to the rest of the world such as Asia Pacific, the UAE and then Africa. This is the prime reason why venture capitalists too have the confidence in us,” says Tewari. The initial money came from the founders. Later, when the idea grew and needed more capital, it got US$0.5 million funding in 2006 and $7.1 million in April 2008 from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) and Sherpalo Ventures of Ram Shriram who was one of the founders of Google. KPCB is a top VC which invested in Google, Amazon and AOL. This would open the right doors for mKhoj internationally. mKhoj is expanding at great speed. It has set up two new offices, one at Singapore and the other at Bengaluru. In less than two years, it has grown from a staff strength of 15 to 100. The next time you see a mobile ad while surfing the Net on your cell phone, remember it could have been delivered by mKhoj.

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One of the areas that gets short shrift during this era of app-mania is the global mobile market where literally billions of users wait to be addressed on phones that never saw a downloadable program. One media buyer once joked to me that every mobile ad network in the U.S. seems to have the same metrics. “They will all tell you about the one billion ads they serve every month,” he told me. “It is the same statistic.”

How about another statistic. “We serve over 5 billion ads per month,” claims Naveen Tewari, CEO of international network inMobi. Tewari says he operates in 24 countries with large footprints in Asia and Africa as well as emerging presence in Europe. Almost all of inMobi’s inventory is from the mobile Web in emerging markets. The company is helping bring U.S. firms like Hi5 and MocoSpace into these markets where mobile phone usage is radically different from the U.S. and brands especially have a unique opportunity to penetrate new audiences.

The emerging markets have two types of users, says Tewari. The “mobile-first” or “mobile-only” users probably have not been exposed to the Web on any other platform than mobile. For brands, this can be their first opportunity to address a new range of customers digitally. These users are drilling deeply into a broad range of mobile content because the handset represents their primary digital tool. The other contingent are the more advanced users who, like their U.S. counterparts, are using the handset for content snacking on headlines, stock prices and sports scores when away from their desks.

For both audiences, and even at a scale of billions of impressions, Tewari says the click-through rates on their ads is five to ten times the rate of Web ads. “In some emerging markets the brands have taken up the mobile Web at a far stronger rate than we would have expected,” he says. “The ad dollars are still skewed to direct response, but in some markets like India in the last three months we have seen 30% of dollars coming from brand advertising.” In Africa between 20% and 25% of the spend is from branding.

The key challenge for content moving into the international market is cultivating local languages and local ad dollars. inMobi targets down to the country level in most areas, which is sufficient given the geography of many of the areas it serves. Tewari says that in many of the Asian markets like Malaysia and Thailand, there is one major city and then a lot of countryside. But there is a tremendous opportunity here both for the publishers and the marketer to establish an early chunk of mind share. Brands like Hi5 and Friendster that fall beneath the radar among many on these shores have enormous followings overseas. For U.S. companies, “this is not a PC Web sphere where international traffic will be 5% to 10%,” says Tewari. “If you can get into an international market early you can be a dominant player and accrue audience.”

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How is InMobi different from its competitors?

Instead of focusing on being different we’d much rather focus on doing things better. What has helped us grow to this point is our focus on solving real customer needs and our value proposition to our partners. InMobi has consistently focused on providing higher quality and monetization levels for our publishers and greater return-on-investment (ROI) for advertisers, many of whom are trying the mobile internet medium for the first time, or for the first time in our region.

Some of the key elements that have helped forge strong relationships with our partners are:

• Our intelligent ad serving capabilities deliver strong advertiser results
• Our self-service web application enables advertisers to kick-start their campaigns in a very easy way
• Publishers signing up on our network can start earning money from their sites in just a few minutes
• We have significant anti-fraud checks in place that help enhance advertiser ROI
• We provide excellent campaign management services for our advertisers & publisher clients
• We have executed successful, localized campaigns for top-tier brands & their agencies that have leveraged the strength of our ad network, and the viral power of the medium
• Our reporting and analytics enable advertisers to manage their campaigns in real time, and publishers to understand their site performances better
• The global data infrastructure set up in India and USA ensures that all our publishers benefit from the phenomenal ad response times

How can small businesses take advantage of advertising on mobiles, especially in this tough economy? is there a clear ROI for them?

The beauty of the mobile medium is that is can cater effectively to the small as well as large advertisers. Small businesses are especially sensitive to the ROI and the reach of the medium and Mobile advertising is a sector of the advertising industry which scores very high on both those fronts. The measurability of the medium validates the statement. In mobile advertising, advertisers can track every penny and see the performance gained by investing their money. Advertisers will know exactly how many times the ads were served and how many users clicked on it as well as the amount of time spent on the advertiser pages. This sort of detailed analytics is not possible with traditional media. Hence, in the current tough economic times, it makes even more sense to invest in methods that can show the value for money so that advertisers do not waste an extra penny.

How do you see social media playing in your field?
Social networking is exploding on mobile phones. In fact social networking sites are consistently some of the highest traffic destinations on the mobile internet and have naturally become a big and important part of the eco system. These sites also provide demographic parameters which further help serve even more relevant ads and deliver high ROI to the advertisers as well as the publishers. Social media has a big impact in our line of business. There is the straight forward impact in terms of social networking sites and the number of users visiting those sites. Also, the users of such sites fall into the youth audience who form the majority of the mobile browsing traffic. Other than that, social elements are viral in nature, that play an important role in our field. For example, if we consider our latest Reebok campaign, we had a feature where users could send wallpapers as gifts to their friends. This feature attracted the largest share of audience showing that such social elements when embedded into a campaign can prove to be one of the success drivers of the campaign

What’s the biggest challenge for your growth?
The biggest challenge lies in the diversities of the markets. To be truly successful in mobile advertising, it is mandatory to understand the nuances of every market. Growth, for us, does not stop at just entering the market, but has a lot to do with what and how much value we can provide to our partners. Hence, the launch in a geography needs a lot of our dedicated effort to understand the working of the market so that we can provide our partners the insights that no one else can give. That takes time and effort but, it is well worth that investment if our partners are satisfied.

There has been a lot of abuse of ads via SMS. What can be done to change the negative perception of ads on mobiles?
We regularly face the challenge of beating back the skepticism of people when it comes to mobile advertising because mobile advertising is usually connected with SMS advertising. Education is the first step. We focus on highlighting non-intrusive nature of mobile internet advertising and the value it can offer to the users. Over time, as this form advertising becomes familiar, not only advertisers but users will also begin to appreciate it since the user experience they face will tend to improve. Till then, the key lies in educating the advertisers about the differences of mobile internet advertising as well as its benefits when compared to SMS ads.

Privacy laws vary widely over the world, what is the trend in emerging markets and what is the impact on your business?
User privacy concerns are a very important aspect in all geographies, be it the developed nations or the emerging markets. Just because a certain geography is still developing and there are no stringent privacy laws, it is not acceptable to misuse this gap. We believe that by taking advantage of relaxed privacy laws of certain markets, the ecosystem is being harmed. If this continues, the user experience will diminish and in the end it is the industry that will be negatively impacted.. In places where there no/ lax privacy laws the industry should self regulate. At InMobi we treat user privacy with utmost respect.

Tell us the top 3 lessons that you have learned through your work on inMobi?
While it is a common perception that most successful internet companies have emerged from the Silicon Valley and then grown global, InMobi taught me as well as the world, that this is a false assumption. InMobi has managed to grow from an emerging market to the rest of the world. Though I did believe in this initially, InMobi just restored my belief.

InMobi teaches me on a daily basis of how important the people of the company are in the success or failure a company. We all believe in free thinking and this has shown us some amazing results. The innovation, that our young team brings out, has been impressive. InMobi is what it is today only because of the team and I am proud to be a part of this team.

Most importantly, I realized the difference between treating your clients as customers and considering them your partners. When that bridge is crossed, the partnerships made are built on a much stronger foundation. This has brought InMobi a long way. Some of our partners have been with us for a long time now and we work in tandem rather than share a customer-client relationship.

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