Data-shy Indian user forcing Google to shorten video ads
NEW DELHI: The Indian user is changing the way in which California-based internet giant Google is looking at digital advertising revenue, its lifeline: it has introduced a slew of India-inspired products to bring down the load on data consumption: six-second video ads, promotions in search results, compressed web pages and a datasaver on its Chrome browser.
Indians use small data packages, and use low cost smartphones to access the internet. And data-guzzling video ads, usually in the range of 1 minute to 90 seconds, exhaust as much as 2.5 MB per minute, even if they are not high definition. Result: the average smartphone user, who consumes about 1.4 GB of data a month according to the company, would find his data package exhausted in just a few days, and he would be put off by video ads.
“User patterns are different in different countries… Google is taking a mature approach on how to target and develop products for these markets,” said Simon Kahn, chief marketing officer of Google Asia Pacific. Moreover, he says, data cost is unaffordable to “parts of the population”.
So Google launched Bumper ads – six-seconds ads that consume one-tenth or 250 kb of data, but helps brands convey their messages nonetheless.
The company, which has been offering free wi-fi spots at railway stations, plans to extend these to other community gathering areas such as malls and cafes. “That will give people give an opportunity to download videos and watch them later, reducing their data cost -- ads, too, get downloaded,” said Kahn.
Another strategy is to push ads in search results, in an attempt to predict user requirements. For example, if you search for coffee, Google will show ads, deals and promotions at nearby cafes.
This of course leaves it open to spamming. “The system is not perfect as its early days. If you get too many ads, you will ignore them, and that’s self-defeating,” Kahn said.
Large internet companies such as Google and Facebook believe a large chunk of the next billion internet users — as many as 300 million of them — could come from India, and many of them would be accessing You Tube.
“So we have announced 90% data compression on web pages,” said Rahul Roy-chowdhury, V-P of Google Chrome, the com pany’s web browser.
Chrome’s findings show that Indians keep their phones on “data off” to prevent drainage “With Chrome data saver, the user might not have to manage that with so much frequency,” said Roy-chowdhury.