When Facebook tried to offer a version of free internet in India, it didn’t go very well. The company’s app, called Free Basics–which Mark Zuckerberg has billed as a way to help bring people out of poverty through connectivity–gives access only to limited sites (like Facebook). India eventually banned it and similar services for violating net neutrality, the principle that internet service providers shouldn’t favor particular sites.
A lesser-known company is trying a different approach. Jana, a Boston-based tech company, helps smartphone users in the developing world get online free through the support of ads. MCent, the company’s mobile browser, which can access any site, displays a variety of ads from advertisers such as the NBA, Amazon, and Saavn, a site that streams Hindi music. Then it uses that ad revenue to pay for the data that consumers use. On the back end, the technology can identify a phone number and network, and then credits money into that person’s account.
“We started the project to figure out a way to provide truly unrestricted internet access for a billion people,” says Jana founder Nathan Eagle.
Jana says that it is able to earn more money from ads than it spends to offset data costs–paying for up to 70 megabytes of data daily per user who otherwise would have racked up pay-as-you-go charges–as advertisers begin to shift to targeted mobile ads. Advertisers now spend roughly $200 billion in emerging markets, often on traditional platforms.
The company first began developing its technology a decade ago, and initially offered users internet access in exchange for completing surveys from organizations like the United Nations. But they quickly realized that there wasn’t demand for market research at the scale they could provide–tens of millions of people–and the business model couldn’t support their goal, so they shifted course to advertising.
Jana’s mission is similar to that of projects like Alphabet’s Project Loon, which uses high altitude balloons to create wireless networks, or plans from Elon Musk and Richard Branson to use satellites to do the same thing. Facebook has tested solar-powered, internet-beaming drones. But while Project Loon aims to bring internet to remote areas–or to disaster zones, as in Puerto Rico–Jana is focused on reaching the 90% of people in emerging markets who have connectivity and just can’t afford to use it.
“When you look at something like Project Loon . . . the reality is they’re trying to provide coverage to populations that are not accessible by the cellular network,” says Eagle. “But the reality is those populations are diminishing in size pretty dramatically in size as cellular networks become more and more ubiquitous. So while they’re great projects, that’s not the problem we’re trying to solve.”
The company now provides free internet access to 40 million-plus users in 15 markets. It plans to expand in Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America. “If this continues to scale, I think we have a reasonable shot at getting to a billion users in three to five years,” Eagle says.
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