Yahoo: tablet owners in Indonesia prefer local news to celebrity gossip

Credit: Liputan6

Yahoo and global media network Mindshare released a study about the behavior of smartphone and tablet users in Indonesia. The results can be useful for any startups gunning to see if their mobile strategy matches user behavior in Indonesia.

The study cites an eMarketer report which says that there will be 41.3 million smartphone and six million tablet owners in Indonesia by the end of this year. It is predicted that the number will go up to 103.7 million smartphone and 16.2 tablet users by 2017.

For this study, a survey was conducted with 604 smartphone users and 114 tablet users in Jakarta, Surabaya, and Medan. The full report isn’t available online yet. Here are the results which I think are interesting:

Celebrity and gossip isn’t king on tablets

While celebrity and gossip is the fifth most viewed news genre by smartphone owners, it’s not the case for tablet users where they prefer to read unique stories and local news instead. Celebrity and gossip is not in the top five.

However, last year’s Yahoo and TNS Net Index found that celebrity and entertainment news is the number one content accessed by Indonesian internet users. Maybe that can still be the case if we put in the feature phone users too into this year’s study.

Tablets used most in the evening

Most consumers use their smartphones and tablets to access the internet at home. The biggest activities done online are social networking (38 percent), chatting (28 percent), listening to music (21 percent), playing games (19 percent), and reading content (17 percent). This is unsurprising as Indonesia is indeed a very social and chatty country.

While people use their smartphones consistently throughout the day, tablet usage spikes especially between 8pm to 11pm. The study also finds that Indonesians spend less time on PC and television when there is a tablet present at home. Advertisers might want to pay attention to this shift even though mobile ads still account for less than six percent of the total ad market in the country.

The study also looks at the most popular product searches in Indonesia: fashion items (60 percent of searches by respondents), electronics (58 percent), food and beverages (38 percent), and body care products (36 percent). These respondents have either done product information searches, price comparison activities, review searches, and finding information via social networks.

(Editing by Terence Lee)