India reports an unprecedented 260% jump in mobile ad impressions
India saw radical growth in the mobile industry with ad impressions growing by an impressive 260 per cent in the year starting July 2013, according to a report from Opera Mediaworks.
Android devices such as the Samsung S5 dominate the Indian market
The Asia-Pacific region displayed a 70 per cent ad-impression growth on average but India led the way with a rapidly expanding 260 per cent.
The report found that social sites and apps were the most popular platforms for Indian ads - most of which were served by gaming and mobile brands, making up around 48.1 per cent of all impressions.
A further fifth of ads were devoted to the direct sale of cars, trucks, motorcycles and bicycles.
Most of the ads were delivered as simple banners. Nonetheless, rich media displays accounted for only 3.2 per cent of content but delivered over a quarter of the industry's revenue.
On which smartphones the content was viewed upon, Google’s Android operating system dominated the market with a 41 per cent share and Apple’s iOS only made up a paltry 0.4 per cent.
Finally, the Indian mobile ad audience was predominantly male (82 per cent) with sixty per cent of content viewers in the 18-24 age group.
Mahi de Silva, CEO of Opera Mediaworks, said: “The biggest trend that we identified was really about future opportunity. Mobile users in India who have shifted to smartphones have done so with Android, and we can see that those users are far more interested in categories like news and information, arts and entertainment and business, finance and investing than the India average.
“Given the high monetisation we’ve seen from these categories on a global level, it’s clear that both advertisers and publishers that can deliver rich user experiences on mobile sites and apps in those categories are going to be successful in India as well.”
The Indian mobile market is hugely competitive with western brand Android battling with Chinese firm Huawei for dominance.
Search-engine group Mozilla last month exclusively introduced the Intel Cloud FX to India, a $33 smartphone designed to capture the nation’s growing budget market.