How Facebook Is Creating Its Next Few Billion Users

Facebook announced last year that it’s leading a squad of technology companies in a campaign to get the world’s estimated 4 billion disconnected people onto the Internet — and new data from Pew released Thursday show exactly why that’s so important to the company. In a new study on emerging nations’
adoption of the Internet and mobile technology, Pew found that among 24 nations studied, there’s a large gap between the percentage of people who regularly have access to the Internet:

Facebook already has a staggering 1.23 billion users — but many of the people with an Internet connection and a desire to sign up for Facebook have probably already done so at this point, save the young who aren’t old enough for an account yet. Thus, the Facebook-led connectivity project, Internet.org, is a play by the company to avoid sluggish user growth by going out into the world and creating Facebook’s next few billion users in emerging markets.

Facebook’s biggest hurdle, however, will continue to be bridging the smartphone gap: The vast majority of cellphone owners in emerging markets own a feature phone, not a smartphone — which is why Facebook has long been targeting those users with a pared-down text-based version of its platform.