Amidst a bizarre lawsuit and impending movie, the long awaited official announcement of Facebook hitting 500 million users came yesterday with a blog post from Mark Zuckerberg:
As of this morning, 500 million people all around the world are actively using Facebook to stay connected with their friends and the people around them.
That’s 100 million new users in the last 5 months alone.
To mark the occasion they are launching a new application called Facebook Stories, to allow people to share the impact the social network has had on their lives. However, if you’re more interested in the numbers, there have been a bunch of illustrations, graphs and lists charting the social network’s amazing rise over the last 6 years. I’ve collected some below, but its probably best to start with a few official stats from Facebook’s Statistics page in their Press Room.
- More than 500 million active users
- 50% of active users log on to Facebook in any given day
- Average user has 130 friends
- People spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook
- More than 70 translations available on the site
- About 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States
- Average user creates 90 pieces of content each month
- More than 30 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each month
- There are more than 150 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices
- People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are twice more active on Facebook than non-mobile users
- There are more than 200 mobile operators in 60 countries working to deploy and promote Facebook mobile product
The dedicated Facebook blog Inside Facebook has been tracking the growth via official announcements since 2006 and produced the following:
What’s notable is that towards the end of 2008, the speed of growth really begins to ramp up.
CheckFacebook.com is a website I quite like, and tracks data reported from Facebook’s advertising tool to “help marketers and researchers understand how Facebook is spreading across the globe.” It lists the top 10 countries as follows:
10 Largest Countries
- United States (128,936,800)
- United Kingdom (27,020,020)
- Indonesia (26,277,000)
- Turkey (22,924,780)
- France (19,351,420)
- Italy (16,858,340)
- Canada (15,756,400)
- Philippines (15,284,460)
- Mexico (13,788,560)
- India (11,534,480)
Bizarrely though, it estimates the Global Audience for Facebook as 487,870,220 as of today – so something might be amiss.Ben Lorica of O’Reilly Radar refreshed a blog post from February charting the rise of users in various regions, and what jumps out is that growth in Asia is driving much of the new user base. This tends to be backed up by data from Facebook’s advertising tool (via CheckFacebook.com) which identifies 6 of the tops 10 fastest growing countries over the past week from the continent (China, Pakistan, South Korea, Thailand, Russia*, Iraq**). And its very much in line with Facebook’s overall strategy for growth.
This next chart shows the absolute growth over the past 12 weeks of 14 different countries, all of whom added more than 1 million active users.
Finally, BBC Tech has put together the following infographic which shows, if nothing else, that Facebook dominates Europe and Australia, but still has a challenge ahead of it with Brazil.
It’s often said that if Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest behind China and India. I think the road to 1 billion might be a bit more challenging, and driven in large part by growth in developing nations and by mobile users. Any guesses as to how long it might take?
