Facebook’s Emerging Market Boom: Now 5 of its Top 10 Markets

While there is ongoing media debate around if Facebook’s active user base is shrinking in select developed markets, there is one clear fact in the data: Facebook continues to experience rapid growth in the emerging markets.

Worldwide, Facebook gained 11.8 million new users last month – more than offsetting any potential losses – taking its global user base to 687 million people. In Turkey and India, Facebook has more than 25 million users each – and Indonesia, with 37.9 million users, makes it second only to the US. A recent report by the Dubai School of Government estimates that 50% of the UAE population is now using Facebook – with countries like Bahrain (36%) and Qatar (30%) also seeing significant penetration.

Facebook in Brazil
Brazil is leading the way in this recent growth wave, more than 10% in May, bringing Brazil’s user base to 19 million. Only a few months ago, both Brazil and India remained two of the largest opportunity countries yet to experience rapid adoption of Facebook, due mainly to the popularity of Google’s Orkut social networking service, but Facebook recently began to take active share from Orkut in India, and Brazil is now following close behind in adoption.

China remains the single largest opportunity, and one of the hardest for Facebook to penetrate, due to a variety of factors which deserve more focused analysis.

Local Product Functionality Continues to Expand
Facebook’s payment system will be available in an additional 13 countries across Latin America and Asia in July, enabling the "Facebook Credits" virtual currency system inside all games on the social network to make payouts directly into developer bank accounts. In a similar way to Apple’s iTunes, Facebook keeps 30 percent of the revenues and shares 70 percent with developers. Additional countries with payment support include: Japan, Korea, Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Singapore, Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Mexico – with support for a total of 15 currencies.

Implications to Profitability & Product Development
The implications of emerging market online user growth are significant to a business model and web site originally created for developed markets. Online services must continue to monetize these user bases through the expansion of advertising and paid offerings at a rate ideally equal to the user growth, as the costs for an online service to deal with web traffic and things like photo hosting all continue to increase operating costs. Furthermore, as access in these markets increasingly comes from mobile devices – many of which might be basic feature or early-generation smartphones, the user experience and product development implications require increased consideration in order to provide for the demands of the same users who might be accessing from full PCs or more advanced smartphones.

NZ Herald: Facebook’s billion-user drive could hit China’s web wall
WSJ: Facebook Credits Goes Global With Additional Support in 13 Countries
Dubai Chronicle: 50% of UAE Population on Facebook
Inside Facebook: Facebook Sees Big Traffic Drops in US and Canada as It Nears 700 Million Users Worldwide

This entry was posted on Monday, June 20th, 2011 at 8:50 pm. It is filed under Brazil, Internet and tagged with Facebook, India, Indonesia, Turkey, UAE. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.