Feature phones fade, but still stunt ad potential in some markets: Opera Mediaworks

As of the close of the third quarter, Opera’s reach in Asia Pacific (APAC) and Oceania is over 400 million unique users each month. The APAC region is the largest global market on its platform in terms of unique users. However, it is number two when measured by impressions served and number three for revenue generated.

Despite its inclusion of mobile-marketing powerhouse Australia, Oceania, because of its small population, still trails the other global regions as a combined entity.

On a global scale, Android is the clear winner, dominating the market in both active users and impression volume. However, in Asia, there is still a significant presence of older, non-"smart" devices – accounting for 30.4% of all impressions served in markets surveyed. Though the market share of these feature phones is declining, there is still robust usage in Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines.

Feature phones are not particularly valuable for mobile advertising due to their limited capacity for rich-media and video ad impressions, so the monetisation potential (ratio of revenue to impressions) in most of these markets is poor. India is the only country where platforms outside of Android and iOS support a relatively strong monetization model, with platforms other than Android and iOS having a share of revenue that is nearly twice their share of impressions.

Among the seven countries surveryed in this report, India has the most impressions and revenue. However, when looking only at monetisation potential, India falls well behind others in the region. Much of this reduced opportunity stems from the continued prevalence of feature phones and their limited capacity for rich-media ads such as video. Video is a high-impact and valuable advertising type, commanding higher eCPMs than other ad types in most countries. The only exception is Malaysia, where display ads are on top. Below we can see the volume of impressions and pricing for video, display and native ad formats across the seven countries for brand advertising.

Australia has the highest ratio of video ad impressions to overall impressions and is currently the global leader in revenue driven by video, with a disproportionate amount coming from that ad type. Still, there are markets, like Thailand and Indonesia, that have relatively high percentages of video ads being served, but, because they also have very high usage of feature phones, their overall monetisation potential is somewhat stunted.

India and Vietnam have a very high percentage of users that fall into one of these four audience segments. This corresponds with a relatively high concentration of site use in these countries. In the Philippines, however, the top sites and apps attract a high percentage of total users, but those users have a very wide range of interests, as revealed by the smaller sizes of these four audience segments. This implies that this market has a very pronounced "long tail" for the use of sites and apps across the population. In other words, while most visits can be seen on a small number of site categories, those users demonstrate a wide variety of secondary interests, which results in smaller and more specific audience segments.

In Australia, the vast majority of Gamers (83%) are using Apple devices, with just 17% on Android. In contrast, Android is the dominant OS for Gamers residing in the rest of the countries in this study, with 65% using Android-powered devices, 18% on iOS, and nearly 17% using “other” devices.

The images reveal a profile for which each of the four audiences had the largest representation across the countries analysed. Social was the top content category among nearly all of the profiles, with the exception of Thailand, where Media prevailed. However, all four had different secondary interests.