0.facebook.com means zero money changing hands

By Guillermo Escofet

The recent launch of Facebook’s new text-only mobile website, 0.facebook.com, is a good illustration of the kind of non-commercial relationship that online social networks and mobile operators tend to form. Although 53 operators from 45 countries have agreed to waive browsing charges for 0.facebook.com users for at least a year, they are getting no payment in return from Facebook. No money has or will be changing hands between the social network and its 0.facebook.com operator partners.

So what is in it for the operators?

It could to a certain extent be a retention/acquisition play by them. But these are not partnerships struck by Facebook exclusively with just one carrier per territory. At launch, there were a handful of countries with two or more operators signed up to 0.facebook.com, namely El Salvador, Greece, India, Indonesia, Tunisia and Turkey. The Philippines will soon be following suit too.

The real motivation for operators to subsidise a service like 0.facebook.com is to encourage more of their subscribers to use the mobile Web and, in turn, boost data revenues. This is the logic underlying most partnerships between operators and social-networking sites (or any major online brand, for that matter).
Facebook has become the world’s most popular social network and is one of the biggest drivers of Internet traffic, both on PCs and mobiles. So telling subscribers they can access Facebook on their phones, and on top of it for free, is seen as a big selling point by carriers.

Carrier thinking

Operators hope that by visiting Facebook on their phone subscribers will acquire a taste for the mobile Web and start browsing to other sites as well – other sites where browsing charges apply, leading subscribers to spend more per month on mobile services than they do now. Users about to stray away from the 0.facebook.com site get a message warning them that they will incur browsing charges.

The question for operators is whether there is a risk that 0.facebook.com users will stick to just using Facebook on their mobile browser. After all, in countries where mobile-Web traffic is regularly measured by market pollsters, Facebook is increasingly hogging most traffic beyond the operator portals that the browsers of carrier-sold handsets are automatically pointed to.

However, one factor that might encourage users to stray beyond 0.facebook.com is the fact that users are not able to view photos on the site. If they click to view a photo they get redirected to the social network’s main mobile site – again, with a warning on data charges.

0.facebook.com is designed to give free and faster access to Facebook on mobile browsers and only mobile users whose operator has partnered with Facebook to deliver the new service have access to it.

It is interesting to note that the vast majority of the operators enabling the 0.facabook.com service at launch were based in emerging markets, where mobile Web penetration is the lowest but where there is also the greatest market potential because of the big gap left by the relatively low penetration of fixed broadband and PCs in those countries. At the same time, mobile networks and handsets in such countries tend to be less advanced, making the delivery of mobile Web services to phones slower, dearer and more clunky. And because most mobile users in these countries are prepaid, flat-fee options for paying for data are limited. Hence the perceived need by Facebook for a data-efficient and cost-free service like 0.facebook.com.