NEW DELHI: On Feb. 2, when Meta Platforms reported Facebook's first-ever quarterly drop in daily users, its finance chief identified higher mobile data costs as a unique obstacle slowing growth in India, its biggest market.
Facebook's growth began plateauing last year, when it added a few million users in the space of six months in the country of about 1.4 billion people, significantly lagging sister apps WhatsApp and Instagram, according to the report, which noted:"FB has grown more slowly than the internet and other apps."
Wehner said Facebook's user growth in Asia-Pacific and some other areas was hit by competition, plus comparison with prior quarters when COVID resurgences aided user engagement. He identified higher mobile data costs as a"unique" headwind for India. "Teams across the company should explicitly consider their strategic position and growth opportunities in India. Outcomes in India could drive global results."The internal study, a"high-level overview of the growth trends" in India, was detailed in a presentation meant to help Facebook's researchers and product teams. It said that a key problem Facebook had tried to fix for years in India, with limited success, was related to"gender imbalance".
India ranked highest globally on the latter metric; around 10 per cent of users surveyed in the United States and Brazil said they had seen nudity in the past week, for example, and under 20 per cent in Indonesia, according to a survey conducted in August 2021.Family disapproval –"Family doesn't allow FB" - was a major reason cited by women for not using Facebook, the study found.
The comments stopped after she used the"locked profile" feature, according to the woman cited, referring to an option Facebook introduced in 2020 in India allowing users to restrict viewing of pictures and posts to non-friends. Its annualised growth rate based on May-October 2021 showed it was adding just 6.6 million users per year, versus WhatsApp's 71 million and Instagram's 128 million, according to one internal slide that illustrated the slowdown graphically.
Source: News Formal (newsformal.com)
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