,
19 tweets,
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1/19 Great article in @theeconomist - explains that Entertainment is what drives internet use for the next 1bn users. economist.com/briefing/2019/… (paywalled) some highlights below:
2/19 Indians now use nearly three times as much data on their phones as Americans: 
3/19 “The second half of the internet will for the most part speak languages other than English and Mandarin. It will have little to no experience with other digital media. It will also come online almost entirely on mobile devices.”
4/19 “People want to stay in touch with each other, to be entertained and to express themselves, whatever their income and wherever they call home.”
5/19 “Years of fieldwork across the globe have led Ms Arora to conclude that when it comes to getting online, “play dominates work, and leisure overtakes labour.”
6/19 “When Brazil opened thousands of subsidised cybercafés in the late 2000s it brought internet access to 60% of poor neighbourhoods. The cafés were a huge success—because people used them to watch movies and play computer games. They liked to hang out with each other, too.”
7/19 “…of the Latin Americans who eat only one meal a day, one out of three still contrives to use a smartphone.”
8/19 “…the reason poor people in the north-eastern state of Bahia pay for connectivity is that they see it as a form of social mobility—not because they use it to earn more, but because they use it to be more connected.”
9/19 “In Angola, Wikipedia and Facebook “zero-rate” their services: people using the approved versions of their apps pay no network charges for data from them. They do not get all the internet’s goodies—but they get an internet that is deemed both good and good-enough.”
10/19 “entertainment is the first thing that [users] demand.” A survey of online activity in sub-Saharan Africa saw 85% of respondents saying they used the internet to stay in touch with friends and family. Only 17% said they used it to take classes.”
11/19 “’Timepass’ is the essence of the internet.”
12/19 “The most striking thing they are doing is watching videos—which they are also making, in great abundance. In 2016 there were only 20 Indian YouTube channels with more than 1m subscribers. Today there are 600.”
13/19 “Video offers its users whatever their lives need”
14/19 “It is not just that video is easily available on the internet. To many in the second half video more or less is the internet. Anecdotally, it seems that YouTube is a more common Indian home page than Google.”
15/19 “The preference for video is partially explained by the fact that the next half of the internet speaks a very wide range of languages—but may not read any. Video in another language works better than text; video is easier to post to your peers than writing is”
16/19 “…voice-input systems have found enthusiasts in the poor world, too. New internet users in India routinely use voice commands to operate their phones, including for such tasks as making calls.”
17/19 Android devices are loaded w/ pirated movies/music for a fee at a local shop, often packaged w/ an app called mxPlayer. The app is installed on 1.2m Android phones every day, 2/3 of installs are sideloaded from memory cards, rather than downloaded from Google’s Play store:
18/19“caller ring back tone' is chosen by the user you are calling, who pays for the privilege. The urge driving people to pay monthly for something they do not consume is self-expression, which may be a key to coming up w/sustainable business models for the low-income internet.
19/19 “Smartphones and social media are arenas with a semblance of privacy. Young internet users in the towns and villages of the developing world are delighted to have...a way to communicate and express themselves away from the prying eyes of family, neighbours and busybodies”
