Facebook has a big problem. It can’t get Asians to pay for stuff. Yet

Facebook’s newest earnings report for the first quarter of 2015 reveals plenty of good news in terms of its growing user base in Asia, but the picture is not so pretty if you scroll down to the part about Facebook making money from its users.

The big picture is that Facebook is losing the battle to get its users across Asia to pay for things online. While Facebook’s revenue from Asia is growing, the vast majority of that is from advertising. That should be changing as ecommerce and epayments get more common across Asia and Facebook gets people to make in-app purchases inside the main site and Facebook Messenger for things like stickers, social gaming, and other services . But none of that is happening.

Instead, Facebook’s reliance on advertising revenue in Asia is getting worse.

In Q1 2015, 96.7 percent of Facebook’s Asia revenue was from ads. That’s up from 89.3 percent in Q1 2013. Facebook is actually going backwards.

ARPU snafu

This is shown most starkly in the section about average revenue per user (ARPU). In the past 12 months, Facebook’s Asia ARPU is up from US$0.88 to US$1.14, but it’s reliant on advertising.

This issue isn’t exclusive to Asia; it’s only in the US and Canada that Facebook is growing the revenue that it makes from things apart from advertising. But it’s happening the fastest in Asia-Pacific – and that’s alarming when the continent is Facebook’s fastest-growing geographic area.