Facebook revenue has posted a jump of 27 percent from India accounting to Rs 123.5 crore over the year to March 2015 from the revenue of 97.6 crore in the previous year. This was revealed by the filings made with the Registrar of Companies. However, Facebook has earned less than Rs 9 crore users in the country on an average. India is the second largest market of Facebook outside the United States. In the country, it earns Rs 630 per user.
The social media firm’s revenue from the country is negligible for the company itself that generates $12.5 billion (approx. Rs 84,000 crore) in the overall sales across the globe. It is pushing for the controversial free internet plan in India to outdo Google.
Facebook India’s earnings after the tax increased 33 percent to Rs 16 crore over the year. Facebook has almost 138 million users in the country, and its revenues are too low. The reason is most marketers have increased their digital media advertising spends by almost 70 percent of budget spent on Google. This way, the annual revenues of Facebook increased to Rs 4,000 crore in India since its operations started in the previous decade.
As per experts, marketers are looking to spread their budget throughout the mobile applications and social media platforms. They stated that Free Basics, the latest venture of Facebook is a plan to make the internet available for free by convincing the local telecom firms including Reliance Communications to cover the data usages.
The service is under a cloud in the country as it has been caught in a controversy related to net neutrality. RCom was forced by the telecom regulator to stop distributing the Free Basics plan commercially.
Besides free internet, Facebook is in plans to attract more advertisers by introducing other services that can lure more users. It came up with a lighter version that is fast loading called Facebook Lite for those users who have 2G connections.
