At Baidulinx Inc. we strongly believe that finally internet in India is on the threshold of a revolution. Here we explain what the big trends will be over the next 3yrs and how they will evolve the Indian Internet Market and how, we will be able to take advantage of these trends. In Part 1, we will look at the main areas of increased activity in India and how it will affect the industry.
Hong Kong -- (SBWIRE) -- 10/30/2010 -- With close to INR 70,000 crore having been paid by the Telecom companies to the government for the 3G licenses, we should see a surge in the number of users connecting to the internet through their mobile phone which will be aided by the fact that almost all modern mobile handsets have the capability to access the internet.
As the government rolls out the broadband infrastructure, this 3G presence will be the 1st chance a large percentage of the population will have to access the internet.
The latest statistics released for July 2010 revealed that more than 33 million Internet users in India visited social networking sites, representing 84 percent of the total Internet audience. This was a growth of 43% over a 12 month period whilst the Total audience grew only by 13%. We feel that Social media will continue to grow at a high rate as the number of people having internet access increases. With this we envisage the email & instant messaging applications of the social media platforms undergoing a huge improvement and matching the features & functionalities of the stand alone services. As users get more hooked onto the Social media platforms like Facebook & Orkut, the users will start using the instant messaging & email services built into these platforms to interact with others more and this will gradually reduce & replace the usage of standalone email & instant messaging services.
Barring travel, including air & railway tickets, India has not witnessed significant numbers in other ecommerce verticals. We foresee non travel ecommerce taking off in a big way over next 3 years spurred by verticals like Deal-a-day, Books, Gifting, Luxury retail etc. Digital advertising in India will constitute at least 27% (up from under 9% as of now) of total ad spends over next 3 years. The growth will also get spurred by mobile advertising & DTH advertising. There will be continued dominance of performance metrics based pricing.
We will see a huge demand from advertisers for delivery of audience’s vis-à-vis delivery of traffic. There will be emergence of more options for targeting users on behavior, demographic & contextual relevancy including location based advertising and with higher speeds of internet access, users will start consuming more rich media content as it becomes available. Users will access the internet through various devices (iPads etc.) and not only through Smartphone’s or desktops/laptops. With this there will also be an explosion in usage of mobile applications.
Mobile payments & ecommerce should explode over next 3 years in a major way as internet access is improved and the understanding of ecommerce and how they can increase revenues from the internet is learned locally and nationally.
Another significant factor is that 80% users consume Internet for more than 2 hours / day, while only 33% users watched TV for more than 2 hours/day, none of the users read newspapers for more than 2 hours/day. Almost 75% of newspaper readers read it for less than 1 hour/day and 36% viewers watch TV for less than 2 hour/day. While amongst the Internet users, the percentage of users spending less than 1 hour/day on Internet was only 4%.
The fact that gets clearly established is that the internet users consume Internet far more than any other media! Advertisers need to really note this point since finding these users on any media other than the internet will become more and more difficult as they increase their internet consumption and reduce consumption of other media. In western countries, advertisers are already finding it hard to target the under 29yrs age group by any medium other than the internet and this is something we expect to see in India within 2-3yrs if the statistics are to be believed.
India has the potential for a Silicon Valley kind of environment over next 3 years with lot of entrepreneurial ideas & innovations happening on a scale that will only get larger. Currently deemed an emerging economy, India’s potential to be a global player in the Internet Industry is just a couple of years away.
These are just some of the reasons Baidulinx has a presence in India and why we believe it is one of the best growth markets for our ‘Language’ Specific website and range of services we provide. Visit us at http://www.baidulinx.com or for more information contact us at info@baidulinx.com.