Today, a billion users. Tomorrow, the world. Vaughan Smith, Facebook’s head of corporate development, said in a speech Friday at the Global Mobile Internet Conference in San Jose, Calif. that people in emerging markets didn’t want Internet access per se—they wanted to get on Facebook.
Ina Fried at AllThingsD reported Smith’s remarks.
“Facebook is one of the key reasons users are doing this,” Smith said. “They are not saying they want to get on the Internet in emerging markets. They are saying ‘I want to get on Facebook.’”
Because Facebook users in the rest of the world are accessing Facebook primarily on smartphones, Facebook has revamped its product-development efforts to focus on mobile, Smith said. The conundrum for Facebook: Right now, those mobile users are far less profitable than the ones it signed up in the US, Europe, and other developed markets.
But those are short-term worries. If everyone in the world is on Facebook, be it on a phone or the desktop, we’re pretty sure Facebook will do well for itself.
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