It’s common knowledge that Reliance Jio’s free data service has massively increased Internet usage in India, but a new report throws light on what categories have been benefited and which have not.
The biggest beneficiary of the free data offer from Reliance Jio is — yes, you guessed it right — social media, which technically means Facebook for most people in India.
According to a study by Smartapp, there has been an increase of 467% in usage of social media apps due to Jio’s preview services, now in their fifth month.
This is the highest growth among all categories on the Internet.
What this means is that if there were 10 logins per day on Facebook and similar apps before the trial started, now, there are 57 logins as more and more people check their timelines more often.
The second biggest beneficiary is video. Video apps, such as Youtube, Hotstar, Amazon Prime and Netflix, have seen a jump of 336% as a whole.
In other words, where there were 10 logins before, now there are 44 logins.
The least impact has been felt on sports apps. While there were 10 logins earlier, now there are 28 logins, an increase of 176%.
Similarly, the impact on news and music (audio) consumption is also not that high. From 10 logins, they’ve jumped to 30 logins.
IMPLICATIONS
This has interesting implications about elasticity of demand (price sensitivity) for each of these categories.
In other words, the categories that show the highest growth are also those that will see the highest fall when the free services are withdrawn.
So, while people are likely to continue to pay money to access news and sports information, they are more likely to cut down on their Facebook usage to save money when the free service stops.
MARKET SHARE
The study, conducted using an app that studies users’ data consumption patterns, also showed that Reliance Jio has a high market share in 4G in India.
42% of the users are using 4G services from Jio, while 17.5% are using Airtel 4G and 12.3% are using Vodafone 4G. Idea has a market share of 11.5%, despite having a bigger 4G network compared with Vodafone.