Read more: Facebook's Next Billion Users | TIME.com http://business.time.com/2014/02/13/facebook-internet-org/#ixzz2u42wGNA6
It is focusing on emerging markets
Facebook announced last year that it’s leading a squad of technology companies in a campaign to get the world’s estimated 4 billion disconnected people onto the Internet — and new data from Pew released Thursday show exactly why that’s so important to the company. In a new study on emerging nations’ adoption of the Internet and mobile technology, Pew found that among 24 nations studied, there’s a large gap between the percentage of people who regularly have access to the Internet:
Pew Research Center
However, it also found that once people in a particular country have regular Internet access, they quickly become avid social networking users:
Pew Research Center
Facebook already has a staggering 1.15 billion users — but many of the people with an Internet connection and a desire to sign up for Facebook have probably already done so at this point, save the young who aren’t old enough for an account yet. Thus, the Facebook-led connectivity project, Internet.org, is a play by the company to avoid sluggish user growth by going out into the world and creating Facebook’s next few billion users in emerging markets.
Indeed, Pew’s own analysis of its data makes it clear that Facebook has a golden opportunity in those countries:
That sounds a lot like how we all use Facebook, no?
Facebook’s biggest hurdle, however, will continue to be bridging the smartphone gap: The vast majority of cellphone owners in emerging markets own a feature phone, not a smartphone — which is why Facebook has long been targeting those users with a pared-down text-based version of its platform.
Pew Research Center
If Facebook and the other Internet.org companies take anything away from Pew’s latest research, it should be this: Save a few outliers, Internet usage is “strongly correlated” with income. “Generally, the higher a country’s [Gross Domestic Product] per capita, the higher its percentage of internet users,” found Pew.
Pew Research Center
That leads to a chicken-and-the-egg problem that’s hotly debated in the social sciences: Does improving connectivity lead to greater GDP growth, or does greater GDP growth lead to better connectivity? Facebook is betting on the former, having already spent more than $1 billion on infrastructure improvements throughout emerging markets. If Facebook can get more people connected to the Internet, it hopes, it can get more people connected to Facebook, too.
Read more: Facebook's Next Billion Users | TIME.com http://business.time.com/2014/02/13/facebook-internet-org/#ixzz2u43AVBRX
