M

obile advertising has begun to gain a stronghold in the Indonesian online ads market on the back of rising mobile phone penetration and low data plan prices, a survey indicates.

According to the survey, conducted by global mobile advertising network InMobi, requests for mobile phone advertisements in Indonesia grew by 38 percent, or equal to 1.1 billion requests, in three months starting from last November.

With 4.4 billion advertising requests in January, Indonesia is the second largest market in the Asia-Pacific region with a share of 26 percent after India with a 44 percent share and before Vietnam with an 8 percent share and Japan with a 6 percent share.

The Indian-based mobile advertising network, which serves more than 10,000 online sites in 110 countries worldwide, records the number of requests of global mobile advertisements on a three-month basis.

Atul Satija, the vice president of InMobi, said the highest number of requests came from advanced phones with a 87 percent share and the remaining 13 percent from smart phones, which utilize operating systems like the iPhone iOS, Blackberry’s Research in Motion (RIM) software, Android, Windows Mobile and Linux Smartphone.

Atija said that although smart phones currently accounted for a small percentage of requests, they would likely continue to grow faster than advanced phones and would expand quicker as more affordable devices came on the market.

“RIM-based smart phones have been doing well, but smart phones using Android are going very fast. Android penetration will go up in Indonesia,” he said.

With plenty of room in the Indonesian market, InMobi targets a higher number of partners from Indonesia, Atija said.

“We expect to see an increase of 300 percent of brand advertisers from Indonesia this year,” he told The Jakarta Post. However, Satija declined to specify the number of InMobi customers in Indonesia.

Currently, InMobi works with a number of the country’s popular websites, especially news sites, such as Detik, Okezone, Vivanews and Kapanlagi.

Satija said the growth of mobile Internet in Indonesia was higher than the growth of desktop broadband.

“The desktop broadband penetration is low, which means mobile phones are the first screen for a lot of people, which is not the case in other Southeast Asian countries like Singapore or Malaysia,” he said. Satija added that, coupled with lower data plan prices offered by telecommunication operators, this factor would bring huge advertising opportunities to online sites in the future.

“Data plan prices here are less than half of the prices in Malaysia, for example,” he said.

A data plan is a monthly service scheme offered by providers to Internet-linked mobile phone users. (lnd)