We posted that TRAI had said that 143 million Indians were connecting to the Internet over mobile networks. Only 15 million used fixed broadband. Facebook says it has 82 million MAUs in India. Even if assume 15 million come from the fixed side that means 67 million over mobile platforms. Buoyed by surging user base in emerging markets of India and Brazil, the social networking platform’s MAUs globally rose by 21% to 1.
Facebook is about to announce the results of a major initiative to make its services accessible to those at the bottom of the pyramid who do not yet use smartphones. More than 100 million people, or roughly one out of eight of its mobile users worldwide, now regularly access the social network from more than 3,000 different models of feature phones, some costing as little as $20. Many of those users, who rank among the world’s poorest people, pay little or nothing to download their Facebook news feeds and photos, with the data usage subsidized by phone carriers and manufacturers. We saw this phenomenon back in 2011 when our researchers were in the field in Indonesia and heard them say they use Facebook, but not the Internet. I have also discussed the possible rationale for serving low-income users who may not be generating revenue at this time.
LIRNEasia uses Facebook as another window to its web content that is located primarily on the blog. Since the blog is searchable, it has never been a problem for us that Facebook search sucks. But that is not the case for people who use Facebook as their primary web interface. Now, Facebook is trying to make it easier to find that lost photo or restaurant recommendation and unearth other information buried within your social network with a tool it calls Graph Search. On Monday, the company will roll out the feature to its several hundred million users in the United States and to others who use the American English version of the site.
We found people at the BOP in Indonesia claiming they did not use the Internet, yet going into great detail about their use of Facebook. Our colleagues in Africa, RIA, also noted this phenomenon. Western observers are skeptical about the value of a Facebook phone, but perhaps it may make sense in our parts? A smartphone that gives priority to Facebook services is good for Facebook, but it is unclear whether that is something consumers want. Jan Dawson, a telecommunications analyst at Ovum, said the concept was “a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist.
ComScore has published its tech predictions. It’s all about mobile. The mobile transition is happening astonishingly quickly. Last year, smartphone penetration crossed 50 percent for the first time, led by Android phones. People spend 63 percent of their time online on desktop computers and 37 percent on mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets, according to comScore.
The Internet was born inside US universities and spread out across the world. The same has been true for Google, Facebook and many other currently wildly popular applications. These were the applications that ETNO and its allies unsuccessfully tried to tax, by inserting language in the ITRs. Thankfully, that ended in failure, but as avarice has legs. It will come again.
In light of growing talk of a new divide that is emerging, this time a broadband divide, two indicators are beginning to assume greater importance: Internet users/100 and broadband subscriptions/100. Not all Internet users have Facebook accounts, but all Facebook users are, by definition, Internet users. Some people may have multiple Facebook accounts, but not as many as those who have multiple SIMs. Therefore, it is safe to assume that the number of a country’s Internet Users exceeds the number of Facebook accounts from that country. In October 2012, there were 1,448,160 Facebook accounts from Sri Lanka.
We have wondered aloud about how Facebook will make money, especially from the majority of its users who are outside the US and who access it over mobile platforms. Apparently it made USD 150 million last quarter, the first in which broke out the numbers. The earnings report was the first time the company had broken out from its overall advertising revenue how much money it collects from mobile ads. The information helped to address a critical question that investors have had about how Facebook will respond to the world’s shift to mobile computing; 60 percent of all Facebook users log in from their phones. Although it is not a direct comparison, Google is poised to make far more money from mobile devices.
Something to think about. Earlier this month, Facebook announced that it had 1 billion active users. Of that, 81 percent were said to be outside the US and Canada. The top-five countries in ranked order at this time are US; Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico. Last year, there were lots of reports about Facebook building a server farm in Northern Sweden.
We’re playing around with some ideas about connectedness. We want to use big data to see what real (as opposed to administratively mandated) communities are. Using Facebook’s analytics page, did some surface analysis of SAARC and ASEAN. It is very clear that India is the center of SAARC, being the country that most Bhutanese have friends in (value of 5 given) and the country with the second-largest number of friends for Bangladeshis, Maldivians, Nepalese, Pakistanis and Sri Lankans (value of 4). I guess the only surprise there is Pakistan.
CPRsouth seeks to encourage evidence-based interventions by members. It was a happy coincidence that an op-ed by a paper-giver at CPRsouth7 appeared in print while she was at the conference in Mauritius. She had written it up based on the paper delivered there: The diagram shows the percentage increase from 2009 to 2010 in the number of Facebook users among the top five countries on Facebook and the largest increase was recorded in Indonesia (793 percent). Using web analytics, it was found that Facebook was a popular upstream site that online users visited prior to their visit to official government websites. Over 70 percent of Facebook users in Indonesia access the social media site through their mobile phones (Facebook, 2011).
In an attention-grabbing talk where among other things he wrote off Facebook, the Forrester CEO placed the mobile at the center of it all. Mobile engagement, built on architectural change brought about by the app internet will replace the broader Web as the focus of innovation and change, he said. For CIOs it means, “You are going to put your company in the pocket of customers so that when they need you, they are in contact and you are there for them…anytime, anywhere.” Here is his forecast on Facebook: He then described Facebook as “half way there,” before adding: “I think Facebook is toast…the company is in major trouble around mobile engagement and the app Internet.” Why else would CEO Mark Zuckerberg buy Instagram or be talking about launching a mobile phone, he asked.
Most people access the Internet using mobiles. Many use Facebook from mobiles. Our research in Java showed that people at the BOP were beginning to call Internet Facebook. Yet, Facebook does not know how to monetize mobile products? “We do not currently directly generate any meaningful revenue from the use of Facebook mobile products, and our ability to do so successfully is unproven,” the company said in its review of the risks it faces.
Helani Galpaya’s work and LIRNEasia’s research has been drawn upon for a newspaper column. The novel element we had never thought of is using Facebook as a data source: One other metric is available to anyone, just go to facebook.com/ads and create an ad. It will tell you how many people your ad can reach. For people of all ages, that number is 1,126,020.
You meet new people. You add them in facebook. You chat with them, tag them in pictures, comment on their status updates and share information. Some of us even have our twitter account in our business card. So people may follow you and you may follow anyone whom you think is interesting and/or is informative.
We think a lot about network effects: the positive externalities caused by greater connectivity. A telephone network with 100 subscribers offers 99 calling opportunities whereas one with 10 subscribers offers only 9. That is why regulators had to fight so hard to ensure seamless interconnection that would give the subscribers on each network 109 calling opportunities and compel the operators to compete on some other aspect of service. Here below is a discussion of network effects in Face Book, that is among other things, causing us to place advertisements on it. For an individual member, the most powerful network effects may be indirect ones that come from the huge number of unknown other people in the Facebook world.