9 facts about India’s mobile advertising market

Photo credit: Stefano

India is considered as the next El Dorado in the Asian mobile advertising market with its huge population, growing internet penetration, and economic growth. A few global mobile companies have already announced upcoming investments into the mobile ads space in India. But aren’t their expectations too optimistic? We have collected a few facts you must know before promoting your app in India.

1. 60% of internet-users in India are mobile-only

Unlike the majority of mature mobile marketing markets (e.g. the USA, EU, or China), whose internet audience has been growing slowly from personal computers to laptops and, finally, to smartphones and tablets, India overlapped the desktop stage of internet, jumping right into mobile era. According to the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI), 213 out of the 354 million local internet users are mobile-only. The number of mobile users has indeed quadrupled since June 2012 in the sub-continent of south Asia.

Personal computers are still expensive for the average Indian family, that’s why for hundreds millions of Indians, smartphones became the first devices for access to the web. This fact has shaped the whole culture of internet consumption, making m-commerce extremely attractive for local and international enterprisers, what resulted in high demand on mobile advertising services.

2. 60% of mobile internet users reside in urban areas

Despite the huge developments in Indian economy, internet penetration is still concentrated in the big cities. About 128 million mobile internet users belong to the urban population of India. Only 45 million internet users live in rural India.

3. Majority of users are on smartphones that allow less than 20 apps

About 80 percent of Indians prefer Android smartphones, mostly cheap models that cost less than US$100. Those devices hardly allow more than 20 apps. Those space restrictions make Indian market is a bit tricky in terms of monetization of apps: developers and publishers must care about the size of mobile applications. Apps shouldn’t be no more than 30MB because a lot of phones in India do not have the RAM capacity required for stable and fast execution for heavy apps.

4. Yet screen sizes are big enough to watch videos

Most popular phones in India have diagonal screen sizes of 4-4” (26%), 4.5-5” (28%), 5-5.5” (29%). They are big enough to watch videos. That means huge opportunities in the video mobile advertising space.

5. Indians often turn the data connection off

Even those developers with great products that fulfill all the above mentioned requirements and got high install rates, sometimes suffer when it comes to making money in the Indian market. Usually that happens with the apps that work offline. Why? Because most people turn off mobile data on their phones, switching them on only when they want to check news or instant messages.

6. Local culture can affect retention rates