Thread: You're too poor for facebook

An excellent article from Overrated Outcast

All credit to the author of the blog

You're too poor for facebook

Hey, all of you living in the third world? Did you really buy all that crap about the world being a global village? Hah. Fooled you.
It turns out that we only love you if you sound like a good investment or when you someone makes movies about you which make us go "awwwwww".
As today's New York Times points out, the internet is just as democratic as Rwanda.

Web companies that rely on advertising are enjoying some of their most vibrant growth in developing countries. But those are also the same places where it can be the most expensive to operate, since Web companies often need more servers to make content available to parts of the world with limited bandwidth. And in those countries, online display advertising is least likely to translate into results.

Have you heard of the video sharing site called Veoh? Of course you haven't. How can you? In fact, they don't even want you to.

Last year, Veoh, a video-sharing site operated from San Diego, decided to block its service from users in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe, citing the dim prospects of making money and the high cost of delivering video there.
“I believe in free, open communications,” Dmitry Shapiro, the company’s chief executive, said. “But these people are so hungry for this content. They sit and they watch and watch and watch. The problem is they are eating up bandwidth, and it’s very difficult to derive revenue from it.”

You bad, hungry people with your thirst for videos of cute dogs and frumpy looking reality TV stars. That's why Veoh gave you a big F.U.
Also, that's the same reason that you can't use Hulu.
And all those sex predators on the Indian edition of MySpace (by the way, that's like our version of Orkut. It's full of perverts and creeps and everyone wants to be your fraaaaand) are going to get a little downgraded.

MySpace — the News Corporation’s social network with 130 million members, about 45 percent of them overseas — is testing a feature for countries with slower Internet connections called Profile Lite. It is a stripped-down version of the site that is less expensive to display because it requires less bandwidth. MySpace says it may make Profile Lite the primary version for its members in India, where it has 760,000 users, although people there could click on a link to switch to the richer version of the site.

Uh-Oh.
Those of you who want to see You Tube videos of old segments of TV shows and funny lip synching Chinese kids, are still okay. As long as you don't mind waiting a few hours for a two minute video.

Tom Pickett, director of online sales and operations at YouTube, says the company still hews to its vision of bringing online video to the entire globe. In the last two years, it has pushed to create local versions of its site in countries like India, Brazil and Poland.
But Mr. Pickett also says that YouTube has slowed the creation of new international hubs and shifted its focus to making money. He says that does not rule out restricting bandwidth in certain countries as a way to control costs — essentially making YouTube a slower, lower-quality viewing experience in the developing world.

Facebook hates you too.

“We can decide, either on a country by country or user by user basis, to engineer the quality of the service for that cohort of users,” said Jonathan Heiliger, the executive who oversees Facebook’s computing infrastructure.
Facebook is in a particularly difficult predicament. Seventy percent of its 200 million members live outside the United States, many in regions that do not contribute much to Facebook’s bottom line. At the same time, the company faces the expensive prospect of storing 850 million photos and eight million videos uploaded to the site each month.

Heh.
Nothing personal, it's just business.
You know we love you and we'll be back as soon as we discover how to make money from you.
Is that okay?
Word.
p.s. Is this why you guys use Bittorrent? Figures.

How pathetic???

why pathetic? They are here to make money. what's wrong with that.
They are not a charity. The things they do are the most
correct choices, which is giving their shareholders value.

-F

^ No offence, but would you say that if your company kicks you out citing recession??? (just an example).. Some of those sites are popular also because of the large number of users in developing countries.. Not everything can be justified on a monetary basis IMO

Originally Posted by Raghav_K

^ No offence, but would you say that if your company kicks you out citing recession??? (just an example).. Some of those sites are popular also because of the large number of users in developing countries.. Not everything can be justified on a monetary basis IMO

Yes, I would say the same thing. They got to do what they got to do.

Of course not everything, just businesses.


Now, let me ask you a question, supose you are a CEO of a company

choice A - make content freely available to all countries and make a loss
choice B - restrict the availability and make a profit.

which would you choose?

I agree sometimes choice A will be done based on acquiring market share,
penetration pricing, long term strategy and all that, other than
those situatons what would be your choice?

-F

^ Why not A??? I'd make a balancing act and would try to make the venture successful..

online display advertising is least likely to translate into results.

i'd probably find out why the results are not achieved and try to rectify it instead of throttling end users

If everything is made with the idea of making money alone, then we wouldn't have had lot of things which we enjoy for free :P For ex, mozilla could make money by making firefox shareware,

Myspace is doing good thing by introducing lite version... It will help users with slow connection to use its services optimally...

It is sad that few companies are gonna limit or bar the users from developing world... I think its high time that some Asian based company become innovative and provide good content to users... Users won't have to go to American websites which are obviously hit most by this recession...

Business exists to make money for the owners/shareholders and not for charity. Much as we hate it, business is business.

Raghav cited an example firing during recession. Though very depressing for the fired employee, it does not make sense to keep extra staff. One could argue "why hire if you wish to fire?". The reason is every business that provides human resources based services (IT, BPO, being the premier examples) need to keep the right bench strength to address new business, escpecially during boom time. When there is a recession, you need to get rid of the flab.

To take the argument further, people are cribbing about FUP by Airtel and others. Though deplorable, have a look from the ISP side. What are the users doing mainly? They are downloading movies, music, software, etc., most of which is illegal. While ISPs have nothing to gain or loose by this activity, their bandwidth is being used heavily. It is very expensive to provide bandwidth and if people misuse the facility then there will be restrictions.

This is not to say that I support them and that I am a "touch-me-not" idealist. I am equally guilty, but sometimes. But there is no such thing as a slightly pregnant woman and hence I am guilty.

Coming back to topic, while I am not saying that the discremenation by Facebook, Veoh, My Space, etc. is good (or fair), looking from the other side, I will say, "Show me the bucks and I will provide the service". This is not to state that Asian (and Africans, Latin Americans, etc.) are all thieves and North Americans, West Europeans, Austalians, etc. are all holier-than-thou. But the providers must have done a survey of potential ROI (return on investment). Even with leechers from these places there must be better returns and hence the decision.

The thing to ponder is "are we being severely deprived of something essential?". My answer is an emphatic "NO" and I say to them, "Fine, go and screw yourself. I don't need you."

Let them stop. They have every right to do it. They will find their answer in Linux.

Linux/Open source vs. Microsoft/MAC/Commercial softwares is entirely different topic...

Here the bottom line is resources... in terms of hardware, bandwidth load on servers, and optimum user experience for their targeted audience!

It is a simple principle of demand and supply. We work here successfully. And admin is even sharing a share of his profit through contests. If they have such huge customer base in what they call " non profit zones ", as the demand exists, a new platform may arise. Sooner or later.

I have no problems if they stop. It is their money and their decision how to use it.

Its just a case of increasing e-commerce in India and getting more advertisers to advertise online for every content provider to line up for Indian audiance on the net.

UK audiance is the most valued on the net as far as advertising goes in general and then comes USA and Canada and then Australia, Newzealand and western Europe.
Arab countries despite being very rich are not considered a very big asset due to the fact that e-commerce activities are limited.


The value of a country's audiance on the net is measured from the amount of money an advertiser is ready to spend to get a user from that country to their website/online store or any xyz business they run.

nope, they say copyright restricts us from playing this video outside the US (on veoh.com), so where does the excluding certain countries come into play?

and coming out with stripped down versions of sites like myspace is just good for people out here, the majority of them being on limited plans.

i don't find any of this posted here 'pathetic'.

but the one thing i came across which was definitely very bad was helium.com blocking people from india (dunno about other countries) from posting content. i was doing very good on the site writing articles (most of them in the top quarter, with 2 on the no.1 spot) but one fine day, out of the blue, they say i am no longer allowed to post there.

Trust me its all about money on the net... got nothing to do with serving people and stuff... there are a very few exceptions but other then those site owners are here to make money and some of them make multi million dollars every month.