/biz/ - Business & Finance

Good opportunity here. How do we profit from this, sirs?

>Indians are an increasing powerful presence online. Even with an Internet penetration rate of less than 30 percent, India is the largest market for WhatsApp and its parent company, Facebook. It ranks third by users on Instagram and fourth on Twitter, according to eMarketer, a research firm. Four of the 10 most swiped cities in the world on Tinder are in India. And 1 in 10 Uber rides globally occurs in India, a proportion that is set to grow.

>For years, data prices remained high and growth slow. That changed in September 2016, with the launch of Jio, a mobile network offering low-cost, high-speed data. Mobile Internet connections grew from 346 million in late 2016 to 491 million this year, according to India’s telecoms regulator. In the same period, monthly data consumption jumped by a factor of more than 13, to 3.2 gigabytes per user.

>As Indians come online in the hundreds of millions, the first thing they do is connect with their friends on WhatsApp and Facebook. They then stream Bollywood movies and pornography. Lots of pornography. Searches for “Hindi sexy film” on PornHub grew 27,814 percent in 2018.

>There is one thing missing from this spectacular story of falling costs and rocketing growth: profit. India remains too poor for premium services. Apple, which does not discount its phones, sells just 1 percent of smartphones in India. A Netflix subscription is unaffordable for about 99 percent of Indians. And revenue from India remains stubbornly low for Facebook and Google. Amazon’s Indian subsidiary saw losses grow 30 percent to 63 billion rupees ($880 million) in the year ended March 2018.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2018/12/13/indians-are-reshaping-internet/