Facebook Lite hits 200M users as low-bandwidth world revenue skyrockets – TechCrunch (Feb 8, 2017)
On Facebook’s earnings call recently, it was asked what drove recent stellar growth in Asia (133 million new MAUs year on year, and 28 million DAUs quarter on quarter), and answered that there were three drivers: Internet.org, Android improvements including Facebook Lite, and third party promotional free data plans in places like India, which was the strongest single growth market. Internet.org actually only accounts for a small amount of growth – the last update the company provided was 40 million total users back in November 2016, so although it’s a high profile project for the company it’s not that significant. But today Facebook announced that Facebook Lite has 200 million users, which is over 10% of its total MAUs, and over a quarter of its combined Asia and Rest of World users, which is the vast majority of the target base. So this is the real success story here, and it’s just about making the app more bandwidth efficient for emerging markets, not about zero rating. Now, obviously those 200 million aren’t all incremental new users for Facebook – some will have switched from using the regular app – but this is a big growth driver for Facebook. Also worth noting is that all those three growth drivers are about either bandwidth efficiency or paying less (or nothing) for the same bandwidth – this is the single biggest factor in Facebook’s growth in emerging markets.
via TechCrunch
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