6/13/22, 12:06 PM Myanmar to reach 28% Internet penetration and 15 million users - Internet in Myanmar automatically pushed and installed on the device. The smartphone is ready to communicate with the Internet and could even start syncing applications and running updates on behalf of his owner. This data communication is billed by the mobile network and then the smartphone owner categorized as an Internet user. This unintentional use of internet will inflate artificially the mobile operator statistics and can explain the gap between Telenor CEO statement and the results found by Kepios. So what is the truth? A few facts and stats would suggest that the truth could be somewhere in the middle. First of all, it could be tempting to look at Facebook users as the social network is so popular in Myanmar that some even say “Facebook is Internet in Myanmar”. Kepios also states that every internet user in Myanmar is a Facebook user. As there is no official figures about Facebook users in Myanmar, a useful workaround could be to check Facebook Ads. Facebook Ads is a powerful tool to advertise content across the social network. When creating the ads, the tool let you select an audience based on location, demographic, interest and so on… Based on your criteria, Facebook will give you an estimate of your ads audience. By selecting an audience “Myanmar nationwide between 13 and 65 year old”, we end up with an estimate target size of 22,944,000 users. As we run the same test with other countries where the Facebook users are well known, we find out that the audience matches the number of Facebook users with an error margin of 10%. In conclusion, using this technique, we could estimate the number of Facebook users in Myanmar to be between 20 and 25 millions. Quite far from Kepios statistics. https://www.internetinmyanmar.com/internet-penetration-sept-17/ 3/13