75% of all mobile traffic is attributed to online video: Rajan Anandan

Rajan Anandan, Vice-President, Google India and South East Asia, presented some interesting facts and figures on ‘The New Indian Internet User’ at this year’s Subhas Ghosal Memorial Lecture, organised by the Advertising Agencies Association of India (AAAI) and Subhas Ghosal Foundation (SGF). 

While stating that digital today is mainstream, Anandan said that there are 390 million Indians who have access to the Internet on a monthly basis. Of these, as many as 330 million – comprising around 80 per cent – Indians access the Internet on their mobile phones. “We are seeing that phones are getting new features day-by-day, which is really good for the Indian market,” he added. 

Anandan noted that the launch of Jio has had a significant impact on India’s data consumption. “Prior to Jio’s launch, the data consumption was around 8 GB per user per month. Today, each Indian user consumes more data than other developed countries in the world. The only two countries with higher Internet consumption are the US and the UK,” he pointed out. According to him, the only constraint for Indian market is the availability of devices. 

Here, he mentioned an initiative, called Internet Saathi, which was launched three years ago by Google and Tata Trust to promote Internet usage in rural India, especially women. Anandan informed, “We have trained about 20 million to use the Internet in the last 3 years. Today, we have 50,000 Internet Saathis bringing over 200,000 villagers under the digital network.” 

Citing some statistics on the way data is consumed in India, Anandan noted that online video is leading the growth spurt in mobile traffic. “75 per cent of all mobile traffic is attributed to online video. India has moved from being ‘Message First’ to ‘Video First’ market in the last 12 months,” he added. 

He also pointed out the growing popularity of voice search, which is seeing a greater growth trajectory in non-English usage. To support his point, Anandan said, “While voice search in English has seen a growth of 270 per cent, Hindi voice search has registered a 400 per cent growth. There have been more voice searches and thus, voice search needs to be explored more.” 

Shedding some light on the e-commerce space in India, Anandan said that almost 95 million people are active product buyers in the e-commerce market. However, 54 million have stopped online product purchase post the first purchase. According to him there were various reasons for such a disappointing reaction such as product quality or service issue, lack of knowhow on return or redressal or difficulty in handling online transactions. He stressed on the need to keep users engaged and to retain them post the first purchase. “The real need is ‘To Solve for India’,” he emphasised. 

He called on the industry to tap the new Internet users in India, who are primarily women, people in rural India and those who are learning to adopt e-commerce. Thus, ‘The Time is Now’.