It's still difficult for people sitting outside North America to make sense of these high valuations. To me, dropbox and youtube were even interesting case stud

It's still difficult for people sitting outside North America to make sense of these high valuations. To me, dropbox and youtube were even interesting case studies. It all seems quite simple now, but in the initial stages, people wondered how they are going to make enough revenues to recover the infrastructure costs. But I have begun to see a clear trend in how the Social Apps, Sharing (Rental) Economy apps, and Ecommerce are behaving at different places across the globe. 100 Million users of a social app in US (followed by other western countries) are several times more revenue generating than the developing countries. The one metric that matters here is the Average Revenue per User (ARPU). Mobile advertising is growing in second and third world countries, but still lags behind. Not to say that users elsewhere are any less useful; Facebook has a huge focus on the Indian Market. Apps for rental(sharing) economy, Uber et al, work more evenly everywhere, since they bring a straight cut out on the amount paid. The segment that seems to works most at par globally has to be Ecommmerce. Amazon committed a $2Bn investment in India in 2014, as Flipkart got over 1.5Bn in funding.