Although smartphone users in Indonesia is still likely “freebies lovers”, the cooperation between Research in Motion (RIM) and Indosat to provide an alternative payment solution for BlackBerry App World is quite successful. As quoted from IndoTelko, ever since operator billing is imposed for the BlackBerry App World through Indosat since December 2011, there are nearly one hundred thousand BlackBerry paid apps have been purchased. As of late 2011, there were 1.7 million BlackBerry users utilizing Indosat. The default payment scheme in App World is by using PayPal and credit cards.
Assuming that each application or themes worth US$0.99 (on average), that means that Indosat customer is willing to spend nearly US$100 thousand for 3 months paid content. Maybe this is not much from if calculated value wise, but I think this could facilitate as payment alternative and encourage user who wishes to purchase an application without going through a hassle as signing up for a PayPal account or owning a credit card, which is still not common practice in Indonesia. So in general this result is a positive thing. Unfortunately, we do not know the comparison with PayPal or credit card purchase.
Although the stereotype of Indonesian users is as I have mentioned above, that does not mean the future of content sales is bleak. migg3, RBT or even premium SMS actually are prove that people actually willing to buy premium content, the key is to provide convenient payment method. It seems that so far, the payment method using operator billing or toll cut has encouraged people to easily make a decision before purchasing an application.
