Facebook opens up Gifts to Indian users, but the catch is, you can only send gifts to users in the U.S, and not receive them.
Facebook Gifts, the service that was launched for users within the US, has now just opened up its doors to a wider audience. Users across U.K., India and Canada are reporting that the feature is now available on their profiles as well.
However, the update to the Facebook service isn’t as far reaching as we had hoped. Users in U.K., India and Canada can definitely access the Gift feature, but they can only buy gifts for users in the U.S. That’s right, if you’re thinking you can get off easy by buying Facebook Gifts for your friends, you’ve got another thing coming. Users in these countries can only send gifts to users in the U.S., but cannot receive them.
While this expansion does increase the potential audience for Facebook’s relatively new monetization channel unfortunately, Gifts seems to be growing slowly, at best. Facebook made $5 million from non-game payments in Q4 2012, a portion of which came from Gifts, but CFO David Ebersman said that user-promoted posts were the primary source of that revenue.
Ebersman said he expected Gifts to continue to represent a small percentage of Facebook’s overall business as the company experiments with the design and functionality of the product. Facebook is due to report its first quarter earnings of this year on May 1.
Source: MediaNama