Keep the free service running in poor and censored countries, even at a loss

Tanuj ChatterjeeNo, no. So it's limited. So I mentioned our average engagement time is 30 seconds on the app or less. So you don't have much of a window to show an ad. So to your point, yes, we have interstitials and we have full screen ads, and we have some native banners and all, but we don't try to optimize it for profits necessarily. Some countries, high rev countries, US, Western Europe and all, they're profitable.

Tanuj ChatterjeeAnd in some cases, even the match rates are low, the CPMs are very low. It's totally okay with us. So I came from the e-commerce world. We used to get spikes on Valentine's Day and Mother's Day, and Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Our spikes usually happen because of geopolitical issues. So I'll give you an example. I think it was last year, Turkey banned Instagram for 11 days, and we got 15 million downloads in 4 days.

Tanuj ChatterjeeAnd if you think of Turkey's population, it's 85 million. And if you think of 50 million downloads and think of the internet population using it, it's probably 30 to 40%. So, do we make that much money in Turkey? Probably not. There are countries where there are more issues that are poorer. Myanmar, for example.

Tanuj ChatterjeeIt's having a civil war, but we just think it's the right thing to do. People should have access to information. People should access to free information. They should not be constrained by just propaganda. So we just provide service even if we lose money. As long as, yes, we are running a business, but we are not trying to over optimize this.

Jacob EitingAre you on ads? Do you defer showing ads until you've determined somebody's not a likely purchaser? Do you have any orchestration between showing ads versus not and stuff like that? Or are you thinking about it that granularly yet?

Tanuj ChatterjeeWe started building a team. We started focusing on service quality. We started some basic things about ASO, localizations and whatnot, but mainly service quality. And then things started going up. In the last five years, as you know, a lot of geopolitical things also happened, where suddenly we'll get a massive spike. So as we were starting to go up, we will see a massive spike from country A versus country B.

Tanuj ChatterjeeAnd what happens is once the spike is gone, you hit a new normal at a higher level. And we were, like I said, in many cases we are not making money. We're losing money. There are many countries right now in this world where we lose a lot of money, but it's totally okay with us. That was totally okay with us even then. We said, "Okay, let's build a product that everybody wants to use and we are proud of."

Tanuj ChatterjeeAnd that flywheel took effect. We kept improving service quality. We spent some time on the air, so those things we did, but I'm sure there are companies that are doing a much better job than us on that one. But the thing that it's not important, it's important, and we spent some time on it. Did we do the best we could? At that point, yes. Are there better ways to do it? I'm 100% sure, yes.