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T Agranet Multicitra Sibercom, the publisher of Indonesia’s largest news portal, detik.com, has singed a deal with global mobile advertising network, InMobi, to form an exclusive partnership to introduce a new mode of digital advertising for the mobile digital platform.

“We just signed an exclusive two-year agreement with Detik.com, which is the first in Indonesia for mobile advertising,” said Phalgun Raju, InMobi regional director and general manager for Southeast Asia, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

InMobi specializes in developing mobile advertisements, with brands such as Disney, Air Asia and Citibank in their portfolio.

According to Phalgun, the partnership with Agranet will focus on enabling rich media mobile ads to be featured on Detik.com’s mobile-based versions running on smartphones and tablets.

These media ads would allow more “engagement” as they could feature moving graphics, videos and even games, she said.

The deal, she added, would allow InMobi to “exclusively serve advertisement from brands and agencies” wanting their ads running on detik.com’s mobile version.

She further pointed out that the sheer size of Internet users accessing Detik.com was a factor that drove InMobi to form an agreement with the news portal.

Web traffic computing site Alexa places the news portal in ninth position in its list of top Indonesian websites. Detik.com scores around 25 million page views per day, 2.2 million of which through smart devices.

Detik.com Group marketing services head Gerry Leo Nugroho pointed out that a majority of ad views — which had an average “ad impression” of 200 million per day across all Detik.com’s properties — still went to the desktop version of the site. He added that this deal would therefore allow them to lure more advertisers to the mobile version.

“If we can get this deal going, we could eventually grow the entire [advertising] industry,” Gerry said.

Phalgun added that although the use of smartphone, on which the ads could be run, is lower than feature phone use, the numbers were on the rise.