The Next Billion Internet Users

If you’ve taken a look around Google’s blog, the Keyword, you might have come across the section dedicated to Google’s Next Billion Users. While Google enjoys a 92% market share among search engines world-wide, they see their next opportunity in parts of the world with limited internet access and with people who might never have used the internet before. Specifically, they’ve set their sights on the developing world, where more than 65% of the roughly 4B people in the world without internet access live.  

There are plenty of very compelling social and economic reasons for wanting to bring access to underserved areas. For one, getting the world online could expand world output by 7% over the next five years. But interestingly – and the way Google sees it – the developing world will actually lead the way for how the rest of the world uses the internet. As Caesar Sengupta, Google’s General Manager & VP, Payments and Next Billion Users, put it in his February 14, 2018 post to Keyword:

“The future of the internet is in the hands of the next billion users—the latest generation of internet users to come online on smartphones in places like Brazil, China, India, Indonesia and Nigeria. As time goes on, the average internet user will be more like these “next billion users” than the first billion who started on PCs. That means we need to look not at Silicon Valley or London but to places like Sao Paulo, Bangalore, Shanghai, Jakarta and Lagos to truly understand where the internet is going.” 

What Sengupta is getting at is that users in these areas may be the most aggressive adopters of new technology like mobile, voice assistants and AI. To understand why, consider some of the barriers users in these regions face. Their access to internet and technology is often expensive and patchy. For this reason, the developing world tends to favor mobile over PC. Worldwide, 49% of internet data is accessed via mobile phone (versus PC). Nigeria, India and Ghana far and away lead the way in this metric, with mobile internet access rates in the 72-73% range. In fact, according to Sengupta, many of these users will never use a PC in their lifetimes!

Feature phones are also popular in these markets. These are no frills smart phones with tiny memories and physical keyboards but are generally equipped with a color screen, microphone, camera and GPS. The appeal is that these phones are inexpensive, light on data use and offer good battery life. India’s Jio phone for example is effectively free with a refundable security deposit of $16 US. Feature phones run “lite-apps” like Google Go which are designed for devices with 1.5GB memory or less and pull compressed versions of webpages in order to minimize data demand. Google has rolled out a suite of “Go” apps; lite versions of maps, Gmail and Google assistant which are ideal for these devices. Lite apps are extremely popular. World wide, Facebook-lite was the 10^thmost downloaded app on the Google Play store in June 2019, with over 24M downloads. 

This brings us to another barrier these users face in using the internet: differences in terms of relevancy of content, language, and literacy. By some estimates, 55% of the content on the internet is in English. Meanwhile, Hindi, with 341M native speakers, makes up about .1% of all internet content. This is understandably unappealing for most of the world. Google’s efforts to clear this hurdle are apparent in Google Go, which advertises features to “make Google read it” (point your camera at text or listen to any web page), “search and translate with your camera” and “easily switch between languages”. Meanwhile, Google Assistant, which comes preinstalled on the Jio phone, is now available in 30 languages including Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam and Urdu.

Part of the major appeal to voice command in these markets is that users coming to the internet for the first time prefer to use it in more intuitive ways than the way we do now. While the world is generally pushing towards a more frictionless and integrated internet experience, this may be even more so in developing countries. This preference is reflected in the way they use the internet and the type of content they consume. The web is surfed on the go by mobile phone. These users will much rather verbally ask their phones questions than navigate to a website. They’ll prefer to consume video (in their own language) than read lengthy text in English. When there is text to read, they may opt to have their Google Assistant read it out-loud and maybe translate, too. Successful apps will be built around people and conversations. For example, popular banking apps, like Tez in India, are built to work more like chat apps than financial ones. And in this way, the developing world will push all of us towards more convenient and human-like interactions with technology.