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Five Industry Players Answer WATBlog On Where Mobile Search Is Headed In India?
(4 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
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Recently Affle announced a tie up with Airtel on the sms search front with its SMS 2.0 product which would be powering the sms search on Airtel. We felt there was a need to get a sense where this Industry i.e. the mobile search space was headed be it sms search or search via mobile internet.
We spoke to Industry players like Affle, Mobile Worx, Metromela, Asklaila and Yulop who are providing the mobile search feature in one form or another to better understand what was their take on the Mobile Search. What is the kind of numbers they expect. When to do they expect their services to scale and how mobile search compare with desktop search online.
“Mobile Search (both sms & gprs) will be 50% of all searches (sms, web via desktop and gprs) done in 2-3 years!”
Both Pankaj Joshi - Co-Founder of Metromela and Anuj Kumar Executive Director of Affle (South Asia) felt that mobile search would have 50% share in the total searches made. Though Anuj was slightly more upbeat than Pankaj and felt that the 50% share would be achieved in the next 2 years while Pankaj felt it would take 3 years. Asklaila Co-Founder Shriram Adookurie was very conservative though and felt it would be only 20% of overall searches in the next 3 years. Asif Ali CTO of Mobile Worx said that it was hard to say what would be the numbers like given the differences in mediums.
SMS Vs GPRS - Which takes the cake on search?
All those asked felt currently sms takes the cake. Sridhar G Co-founder of Yulop stated that 95% of searches via mobile would be via sms while gprs would account for 4-5%. Pankaj of Metromela said that he is betting on the upcoming 3g access on mobiles and felt that it would redefine the numbers of sms vs gprs search. Shriram of Asklaila was of a different opinion on the numbers of searches currently. He felt the mobile search was equally divided at 33% each for sms, wap/gprs and USSD Gateways. Anuj of Affle and Asif of Mobile Worx said that it was difficult to give the split as there was no third party data accessible to them.
Revenue Models that will work for Mobile Search in India?
Most of the Industry players thought that charging consumers for accessing search was surely not going to work they felt that the scalable model was that of mobile advertising. Sridhar of Yulop felt that besides for ads Location Based Services has lot to give if GPRS penetrates and the best revenue model at this stage would be a lead generation, where with the help of LBS application, one can actually bring the consumer to their shop via moble search. Pankaj of Metromela also felt that besides for ads lead generation would be a good revenue source for mobile search in the future.
Shriram of Asklaila also felt that Ads would work on mobile. His reasons were that yeild is much better on mobile. According to him the mobile user are more serious and would have higher conversion. he also felt that all long tail advertisers would love mobile advertising.
How Big will the mobile search market be in the future?
Sridhar of Yulop felt that only WAP/GPRS based mobile search would be a 500 crore market in the next 4-5 years. Shriram of Asklaila felt that the total mobile search market i.e. sms/wap/gprs would be around a 50 million $ (250 crores approx) market in 2-3 years. Pankaj of Metromela felt that 70% of their own revenues would come from mobile search 3 years from now. Asif Ali of Mobile Worx stated that in 3-5 years 25% of all mobile advertising revenues would come via ads served on mobile search pages. He stated global numbers of mobile search being 2.4 billion $ market by 2011-12.
What are people searching on mobiles?
Shriram of Asklaila felt that 60% of all the searches on mobiles would Local searches in 3-5 years time Currently he said that only 10% of mobile searches were local in nature as almost 90% of it was adult content and VAS related searches i.e. ringtones, games, images etc. Asif Ali of Mobile worx felt that free content was very popular currently and though local searches were catching up a mass adoption of mobile search was still a few years away.
Finally What’s Stopping Mobile Search? What are the biggest hurdles?
Asif Ali of Mobile Worx listed out the following obstacles to mobile search:
Cost – it has to be free to the user, just like the Internet. If it has a cost attached to it especially the current pricing of SMS, mass adoption will be difficult.
Medium –SMS is the largest medium now and mobile search companies must also focus on SMS as much as they need focus on WAP. But that’s a difficult problem to solve as SMS is not feasible for small and medium players until the revenue cycle starts and that is a deterrent.
Content and Relevant / Local results: It should help in delivering absolutely relevant search results – delivering first 5 of 5 billion search results alone doesn’t help
Content discovery is not easy and should be become easier and seamless – this is still a bottleneck (which I believe, google and a few others are addressing to certain extent) where the pages on the Internet must be well formatted to fit the mobile phone incase the mobile site is not available.
Network speeds - the current connectivity offered by carriers is good but definitely faster connectivity and 3G in Metros will really help accelerate adoption.
Anuj Kumar of Affle pointed out the following obstacles:
1) Penetration of Mobile Internet, which is contrainted by the cost of plan, and difficulty which an average user faces to activate a simple data plan on his handset. Getting a data plan on your handset is sometimes the most painstaking experience which differs by MNO and by circle
2) Getting users to start using the mobile for data services - Actions like launching browsers are alien to most people.
Sridhar of Yulop felt that operators needed to realize that they were sitting on a goldmine with their gprs services. He questioned how did the operator plan to monetize gprs once 3G came into India? He felt gprs should be given free by the operator.
WATBlog Analysis - Mobile search is most definitely one of the key areas where the Indian market could boom in the future given the mobile subcriber base booming in India. Also given the local information being extremely critical i.e. be it road information, hotels, restaurants, shopping etc mobile and LBS could work really well in India.
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The number of GPRS users in India are significantly low to kick start mobile web search in India. I am not sure why people are so much optimistic about 3G. We have the technology in place, but to me its use is severely limited. To grow like 2G it has to expand in rural areas. One place where 3G can make a difference is through data cards but then that won’t be mobile search.
In order to reach beyond 5% of English literate population of India, SMS, Search, Advertising, Web will have to be available in Indian languages - specially Hindi. Unfortunately, we do not see much action on this front by either Handset manufacturers, TSPs or content providers.
I would agree with Asif on the current trends of mobile advertising. ZestADZ (www.ZestADZ.com) is doing a gr8 job in this space.