South Africa has slipped on the latest mobile stats into fourth position of countries generating the most mobile Internet traffic on the Admob network (www.admob.com), being supplanted by the United Kingdom (UK).
Riaan Groenewald, Multimedia Solutions Operational Director, says according to Admob, the world's largest mobile advertiser, in January South African users generated 151.78 million page impressions, while the UK generated 151.88 million impressions. This compared to December where South African users generated 20.65 million more page impressions than UK users to post a total of 142.28 million impressions.
What is even more significant is that South Africa has fallen behind Admob's overall growth figures and is growing at a far slower rate than the other three countries in the top four markets generating the most traffic on the mobile Internet.
“Over the last five months, the number of impressions on the Admob network grew by 49 percent to 2.37 billion impressions each month. The United States increased its monthly traffic by 73.12 percent to 1.16 billion impressions, India increased monthly traffic by 68 percent to 268.98 million impressions and the UK increased its monthly figures by 77.62 percent to 151.88 million. In contrast, South African traffic stats only grew by 38 percent over the same period."
Lack of local publishers:
Groenewald says one of the reasons for South Africa not being able to keep up with the growth of other countries' mobile Internet stats is that there are so few publishers in South Africa.
As a result, South African users of the mobile Internet are going to international mobile websites (mobisites). Consequently, South African companies wanting to use the mobile Internet to advertise have to advertise on international sites to reach local users.
And many of the local media houses and companies which have their own mobisites are not doing enough to promote their mobisites which means that people don't know about them.
Growing traffic:
The first thing that is key to improving the usage of the mobile internet is to make quality content available, says Groenewald.
“Mobisites can be accessed by the vast majority of cellphones in the market because they are WAP based. However, mobisites can also be customised to provide video for more advanced phones like the Windows mobile phones and Blackberries. The mobisite identifies the capabilities of the cellphone when it accesses the site and simply displays the most appropriate version of the site,” he says.
What this means is that companies and media houses can create mobisites which can be accessed by approximate 25 million mobile subscribers in the country. That's in contrast to about 3.85 million Internet users.
From there companies with mobisites need to begin educating their clients and the market about what is available from their mobisite and the rest of the mobile Internet, he says.
Mobisite capability:
Mobisites are optimised for the cellphone and offer a far faster download time (even over GPRS) than most large websites offer at broadband speeds. And unlike a mobizine, which needs to be downloaded as an application onto a Java-enabled cellphone, mobisites just need a cellphone web browser and the network GPRS settings.
Mobisites also allow companies to offer services to clients because they are interactive like a normal website. Orders can be placed from mobisites and information can be retrieved by the consumer.
Groenewald says South Africa is at the forefront of development on mobisites and some locally developed sites are taking it even further, giving consumers the ability to initiate purchasing decisions. This will soon be extended to services like tracking packages, account balances and e-commerce.
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