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It has to be the highest acquisition-dollar / employee of all time. I doubt anything even comes close. And isn’t it true that they were profitable on their $1 p

by krrrh 5y ago

It has to be the highest acquisition-dollar / employee of all time. I doubt anything even comes close. And isn’t it true that they were profitable on their $1 per year subscription scheme? I’d love to read a book about how it all came together. Especially something that dives into the speculation I’ve had that their relationships and zero-rating contracts with telcos in developing countries and how that could be leveraged into internet.org and establishing FB in emerging markets was a bigger driver for getting the deal done than the idea of owning IM. Does anyone know if there are any interviews with the team that negotiated the zero-rating deals because seems like excellent execution before almost anyone stateside realized what the play was.

disgruntledphd2 5y ago
Ah yes, when HN decided that poor people in India shouldn't have any internet, because Facebook was providing it. To be fair though, the zero rating/internet.org stuff does appear to have made a massive difference to internet availability in developing countries, and it juiced FB's user growth numbers, as it was intended to do.
- krrrh 5y ago
  It happened to coincide with hyperbolic campaigns around net neutrality stateside and a lot of that language got overextended to really different situations. I spent a month in Myanmar in late 2016 and different providers had different zero rating on different services. The one I went with offered generous prepaid data plans and no phone service or SMS at all, just unlimited use of Line. I was tickled by this but there were a couple of old Israeli guys in the shop where we got our SIM cards getting massively frustrated that no one could explain how many “minutes” of calling they got on the various plans. None of the staff knew what they were asking. It was just a market at a very different level of maturity, more advanced in some ways, and weirdly pragmatic in others.

by krrrh 5y ago

disgruntledphd2 5y ago

Ah yes, when HN decided that poor people in India shouldn't have any internet, because Facebook was providing it. To be fair though, the zero rating/internet.org stuff does appear to have made a massive difference to internet availability in developing countries, and it juiced FB's user growth numbers, as it was intended to do.

krrrh 5y ago
It happened to coincide with hyperbolic campaigns around net neutrality stateside and a lot of that language got overextended to really different situations. I spent a month in Myanmar in late 2016 and different providers had different zero rating on different services. The one I went with offered generous prepaid data plans and no phone service or SMS at all, just unlimited use of Line. I was tickled by this but there were a couple of old Israeli guys in the shop where we got our SIM cards getting massively frustrated that no one could explain how many “minutes” of calling they got on the various plans. None of the staff knew what they were asking. It was just a market at a very different level of maturity, more advanced in some ways, and weirdly pragmatic in others.