South Africa's mobile advertising revenue surges in 2009

mKhoj, a global mobile advertising network, has released South Africa metrics for its network that indicate mobile internet usage is surging in the country, and that the mobile advertising market in South Africa is very healthy.

Over the past six months, mKhoj claims to have delivered 5000% greater monetization levels for its publishing partners, and says its network inventory grew more than 3000% in the South African market.

The report also showed Nokia making up 39% of the market, dropping handset share of network traffic from 46% in January. Samsung currently holds 33% of the market, and rose from 20% in January. The iPhone made its entry into the market, but only contributes 0.06% of the total network traffic, making it a relatively small but growing player.

Ideal opportunity

Several aspects make the South African market very different from European or North American markets, including cultural and sociological factors. Not only does South Africa have 11 officially recognized languages, scores of other African, European and Asian languages are spoken in South Africa. Couple this with mobile penetration over 100%, and you have an ideal opportunity for mobile marketers with advanced targeting capabilities to capture the cultural context and nuances of languages.

According to the latest Business Monitor International report, South Africa's mobile operators will continue the ongoing deployment of HSDPA and HSUPA, which improves mobile users' experience by increasing peak data rates. This, combined with the launch of new multimedia handsets, is expected to increase South African data service usage even more in the near future.

Top performers

The top five handsets by market share are as follows:
1.Samsung SGH - E250 - 9.16%
2.Samsung A110 - 4.93%
3.Nokia N90 - 4.54%
4.Nokia N70 - 2.93%
5.Samsung M620 - 2.60%

The majority of mobile browsing occurred on MTN Group Ltd., one of Africa's biggest mobile phone companies, currently in merger talks with India's Bharti Airtel Ltd. Cell C and Vodacom take second and third place, respectively.

The top three carriers by mobile ad impressions are as follows:
1.MTN
2.Cell C
3.Vodacom

"We believe these results reinforce our partners' confidence in our value to provide the best results through intelligent mobile web advertising solutions," said Naveen Tewari, CEO and founder of mKhoj. "We're proud to be recognized as the leading mobile advertising network in South Africa."