Content businesses are in for a tough time, as adoption of mobile Internet gathers momentum in India. The switch is happening at a faster clip than you would have imagined: data consumption is growing rapidly. It is not trivial that both Idea Cellular and Bharti Airtel have reported increases in data consumption. Airtel's data traffic in India increased by 20% to 46.69 billion MBs during the Jan-Feb-March quarter (details), up from 39 billion MBs in the previous quarter, while that of Idea Cellular increased as much as 30.99% quarter on quarter (charts). While conducting our YouTube research last year, we learned that for most channel owners we spoke with, 45-55% of video consumption in India is via mobile. You might say that this is all incremental usage, but I wouldn't be surprised if a significant portion of it is a shift. The way we are consuming content is changing, and there are users who might just skip the web and go straight to mobile. Rajesh Jain was right. There are two key challenges facing you - rather, us - as content creators and publishers: - Discovery & usage: If you're asking the app versus mobile web question, you're still stuck in 2010. It's both. The tricky part is not creating an app or a responsive site, but actually getting people to use it. Search isn't a big component of discovery on mobile. Social is. Mobile has taken some power away from the dominant force on the web that is Google, and Facebook's mobile revenue growth (and…
