WAP site access from Indonesia??? are you kidding me??

Sometime ago, I got that kind of respond every time I plan a WAP site as one of medium to communicate with consumers. I was actually expected that attitude though, as there was no data on GPRS usage in Indonesia.

As I browse around and follow the big buzz of mobile marketing world, I found very useful data from admob.

The data stated, there are more than 1 billion requests for mobile ad from Indonesia. Indonesia is the second biggest after US.

mobile operator

source www.admob.com

source: www.admob.com

Assuming the average of ad is 2 per WAP page, the number of there are 500 million GPRS request originating from Indonesia’s mobile operators on January – September 2008 (around 56 million/month). The declining of GPRS price as part of Indonesia mobile tariff price war, unlimited GPRS access for Blackberry service and browsing via BlackBerry APN, and free GPRS promotion done by Natrindo, contribute the trafic spike on 2008 (1.1 Bio on 2008, 84 Million on 2007).

Nokia’s phones dominates the GPRS traffic by contributing 66.8% from over all GPRS trafic, followed by SonyEricsson (25.3%), Motorola (1.6%), and others (6.3%).

WAP sites, how are they?

Couple of months ago, my friend from mobile ad-server network (Mkhoj – mobile search) came to Jakarta.

They showed a very optimistic view on mobile internet (again, mobile internet I refer to is accessing internet via mobile phone, not using mobile phone as a modem) and stated Indonesia is having the 3rd biggest mobile internet traffic in the world. At first, I didn’t buy their story knowing that GPRS penetration can’t be said successful in Indonesia. Even, one of the operators said that they still have lots of idle bandwidth for mobile internet.

They invited me again on their second visit (yes, my 1st meeting with them is actually also their 1st visit to Indonesia) with a better preparation and present me with the same story on how they really optimist on mobile internet in Indonesia and how it will bring benefit to advertisers.

Finally, I challenged them with one of .juicer’s lab product; a news aggregator mobile portal rangkum . They gave me some impressions to play and giving me a chance to know how this ad-server work.

Long story short, I created a mobile internet ad that linked to http://m.rangkum.com and ask my colleague to perform a daily checking on its performance.

In 3 days, I see a traffic jump from mobile internet sites (hey…. they do exist and have traffic!!). Total visits to rangkum mobile sites increase by 60% with more than extra 1000 page views per day. Not to mention,these traffic came from Indonesia as I set my ad can only be seen by WAP traffic from mobile operators in Indonesia. Although most of WAP sites that gave me traffic were adult mobile sites, I believe with all giants dotcom companies (friendster, facebook, yahoo) also extend their access by creating a mobile site version, we can see more and more traffic come from these sites and generate even more interesting mobile marketing industry in Indonesia.

With this small yet productive case study, we try to sell this concept to some of advertisers.