Google, Yahoo, Rediff vie for market share of mobile internet users
Mobile access to internet has increased several folds over the last couple of years. Now search giants – Google, Yahoo and Rediff – are looking to expand their reach to 723 million mobile subscribers once 3G services are launched in India.
A recent study revealed that Indians access the internet on their mobile devices at least 2.4 days per week, almost on a par with the 2.7 days per week PC access to internet.
According to a research and analytics firm – Informate Mobile Intelligence – report, in August 2010 Google Search and Gmail topped the list of most-accessed websites on mobile devices reaching across 45 per cent of the mobile subscribers in the country, while Yahoo trailed with about 30 per cent reach on handsets.
Dominant players like Google claim the success is because of the ‘Mobile First’ philosophy that has been adopted in the past one year within the company. “A couple of year’s back we would be developing applications for desktop consumption but now we have to think about mobiles,” said Vinay Goel, products head, Google India.
Goel said Google wants to cater to all the features in a mobile device. The Google Mobile application currently offers access to Google Search and other Google properties like GMail, maps and Orkut. Google has also kickstarted Voice Search on mobile phones.
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“It is a pilot service from Google labs that allows users to use their phone to make a Google query. The information used by Voice search is the same as that available on Local Search. We have seen that in countries like Taiwan people are using voice-based search more frequently.”
Yahoo is not far off either. Yahoo’s Managing Director Arun Tadanki is looking to broaden their business, as India gears up for 3G rollout. “Yahoo has been platform agnostic — we go where our users go, and the proliferation of smartphone platforms is a good thing if it gets people using mobile Internet.”
With 69 per cent mobile users using mobile internet browsers (as per the On Device Research survey), Yahoo is hoping to establish itself firmly in the mobile space by making the mobile experience more intuitive. “Local is going to be of huge importance to Yahoo,” Tadanki said. “There are a lot of opportunities to use mobile search based on location. It can be when you’re near a certain point, and there’s also a lot of opportunity pairing location with a time of day.”
Google, recently, launched an application – Hot Spot – that allows users to rate restaurants, review them and share the information with friends. “So going ahead, if you expand this you can think about location-based advertisement or other monetising ways. This application can work with Latitude, that allows users to share their location details with a select set of people. It also works in conjunction with maps,” said Goel.
Yahoo is also signing deals with Indian original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to enable one-click access to Yahoo’s portal on the Home menu of the handsets shipped.
Rediff, on other hand, has put its faith on mail access on the mobile platform. In June this year Rediff Mail clocked about six per cent share on the mobile platform, said the Informate data.
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Ajit Balakrishnan, founder, CMD of Rediff.com said: “We realised that email is the most desired application for mobile users but they were skeptical of data charges. So we launched Rediffmail NG, the next generation email service, for Rs50 per month which gives unlimited mails.”
Rediff, although refusing to share the number of subscribers on Rediffmail NG, claimed that small and medium enterprise customers are subscribing in huge numbers. “Next, we will bring in larger enterprises and institutions that already have Rediffmail ids,” said Balakrishnan, who is confident that Rediffmail NG mobile is the first step towards increasing share of subscription-based revenue models on mobile devices.
Mobile games, will be a close second to email, said Balakrishnan. “We have a platform strategy called PlayGully – a casual games offering for its users – allowing game developers to integrate their games with the platform. We will port our gaming platform on to mobile as 3G networks fortify. Tie-ups with telecom partners is on the cards too.”
Banking on 3G and the rich multimedia experience that it is expected to deliver to mobile subscribers, Tadanki said: “User adoption of mobile video, while accelerating, is still pretty nascent, but we are seeing advertisers eager to see those numbers grow on 3G networks.”
Even Google seems to agree. “With 3G now becoming a reality we think video consumption on mobile will be big. Indians love watching videos and whatever content partnership we have will only add. I do feel though that mobile advertisement is still at a nascent stage,” said Goel. He said, going ahead, ad formats too would change.