Yahoo bets big on India’s mobile subscriber base

On the sidelines of the launch of its search marketing solutions for Indian marketers online called Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM) in Mumbai on Tuesday, Yahoo revealed to moneycontrol, that they could be looking at taking YSM to mobile platforms in India soon.

 

Regional Managing Director, YSM, Craig Wax and Managing Director, Yahoo India, George Zacharias, spoke exclusively to Sakshi Sharma and Kishore Butani and said that there is a lot of innovation taking place in the mobile space.

 

Yahoo also feels that there is a lot of synergy between what's happening in the search marketing space and mobiles. "What we have is a big database of ads and advertisers would want us to display those ads in as many places as are relevant and the mobile space is important. In places like India, where ultimately more people are going to access the web via a mobile interface rather than a traditional computer, it's of huge importance to us," says Craig.

 

Yahoo has already run pilots in the UK and Japan with YSM and has put them on the mobile devices in those countries. "There is some innovation happening on the mobile space and we will announce something soon. India is adding 5 million mobile subscribers every month. All the small businesses have mobile phones, even though most of them don't have websites. So mobiles become a very important marketing platform. The way to look at it is, we are essentially creating a platform by which a customer can find a relevant merchant at the relevant time through either a PC or mobile platform," George Zacharias said.

 

"Every advertiser that we bring onto the YSM platform could certainly be distributed across multiple platforms or devices and that is what Yahoo is working towards. Some of the greatest innovation for Yahoo is coming out of India. SMS is huge here in Indian, so we have people at Yahoo thinking about what are the implications of such a service on marketing and how can we tie that to our infrastructure. The way Yahoo is going to win in India is through innovation," added Craig.

 

Sakshi Sharma and Kishore Butani