Indonesian phone maker gives users free internet access, but there’s a catch

Indonesian handset producer Evercoss today announced the launch of its campaign to get the remaining half of Indonesians onto smartphones. To help achieve this goal, Evercoss has partnered with Norwegian software company Opera, on this. The Opera Mini browser comes pre-installed on some of Evercoss’ feature phones.

The initiative is framed as an effort to help get the “next billion people online” and targets 2G phone users who have little or no browsing experience.

During a media briefing today, Evercoss’ CMO Ricky Tanudibrata and Ivollex Hodiny, Opera’s Asia Growth Director, talked about the details of the initiative and their expectations.

Here’s how it works

Think of it as a marketing campaign which grants Indonesians internet access in exchange for airtime to upsell more phones or data plans, with a bit of a social good element thrown in.

Opera has a product called a “sponsored web pass” which lets a third party cover the costs of data transfers on behalf of consumers through the Opera browser, for a predetermined time and volume.

In the case of this campaign, which also involves Indonesia’s largest mobile phone operator Telkomsel, users will receive a three-hour data package (capped at 15MB) for free if they use the Opera Mini browser. The catch is that they will encounter Evercoss advertising in the form of a mandatory survey and offers of new phone models before they can access the web. After the three hours or 15MB are up, they are presented with the option to buy data packages from Telkomsel.

“54 percent of Indonesians are still on feature phones. We want to help them migrate to at least 3G capable smartphones,” said Tanudibrata.

The campaign, he added, is an opportunity to introduce users to upcoming phone models, and give them a taste of the internet on their existing feature phones.

Opera Mini has a “compression rate of up to 90 percent,” explained Hodiny. This makes the browser especially attractive to markets with patchy connectivity, since the high compression makes it possible for pages to load faster and in a data-efficient way. With 30 million monthly active users, Indonesia is Opera Mini’s second largest market after India, according to Hodiny.

What’s Evercoss spending on this campaign?

The campaign will run for two weeks, Tanudibrata said. “We are expecting 200,000 to 300,000 subscribers to use this [free web pass] in one batch, if the result is satisfying, we might prolong.”

A typical data package at Telkomsel costs IDR 40,000 (US$3) for 600MB; this translates into about IDR 1,000 (US$0.08) for 15MB. If Evercoss’ projection of 300,000 web pass users is correct, they’d sponsor IDR 300,000,000 (US$22,740) worth of data. However, the real costs for Telkomsel are likely to be much lower. In addition, Evercoss has a financial arrangement with Opera, but Hodiny was not able to disclose details.

Three hours of free internet may sound ineffective in getting “the next billion people online” on the long term, but Hodiny is a believer. “Everyone benefits from this, the telco, the sponsor, us, and the user. As you know, there’s nothing better than free.”