Blue Screen Of Duds

I normally tend to ignore studies done by market research firms since they are only an imperfect indicator of the market and it becomes your best buddy only when you have to selectively quote numbers during a Powerpoint presentation. A while ago, I had seen a report on Adotas (which quoted a Business Standard piece on a study by Thomas Wiesel) that mobile advertising in India will surpass traditional online advertising in 2009. Now, that is a tall claim for anyone to make, for various reasons that can fit easily in another post.

And as usual, I had ignored the post after giving it the regular ‘raised-eyebrow-followed-by-a-smirk’ treatment. That was till Russell started posting his mobile-specific website, Mowser’s, numbers. If you look at his numbers, it is a bit of a shocker. India leads the way in page views for the month of October with 611,319 page views, followed by South Africa at 303,380.

I do not quite know how to interpret this, but it is a whopper that we are at least 2x in terms of number of mobile page views, compared to any other country. Now, there is a possibility that Russell’s numbers are skewed, but if it is true I’ll have to start tracking one more segment.