6 Comments »This morning Mark Zuckerberg posted on the Facebook blog that the company has officially hit 150 million. That’s approximately 3 weeks after the company announced that it hit the 140 million mark suggesting that the company is now growing at approximately 450,000 users per day. This is a significant pace and if the company keeps up this pace for the first half of 200, the company will easily hit 230 million users. If the pace continues the whole year, the company will surpass 300 million users.
This phenomenal growth is unprecedented, making it the fastest growing social network in the world in absolute terms. Much of this growth has been taking place outside of the United States in countries like Italy, Spain, France, and Switzerland where monthly growth rates are reaching an impressive 50 percent. We will continue to track the company’s growth via our demographic statistics tool.
It will be interesting to see how long the company can sustain this impressive growth rate. Have you been noticing more people using the site?
Nick I have noticed an increase in traffic over all 3 of my Facebook applications. Right after new years is when things really kicked in. On 2 of the 3 apps it could be partially due to some features I released but I suspect most is from the influx of new users to the system. Keep up the great posts and all the best for allfacebook in 2009! Maybe we’ll meetup again at another dev conference
Cory
Mark my words: by the end of 2009 facebook will have 300M users!
Sam G
Tradimax.com
Nick,
I’ve noticed some slowness in FB’s speed but have seen those before intermittently.
I have seemed to be getting more friend requests than normal. Will have to actually take a look at them to see which are legitimate.
Alexander
Impressive growth! has anyone noticed any problem? How can they maintain the service with such a huge rate?
The growth will continue. The question is if advertisers will get how to truly impact and interact with the community.
I think one of the reasons for Facebook’s growth in “Spain” is the recent incorporation of an interface in Catalan. If you check, you’ll probable find a lot of the newcomers over the past few months are usiing Catalan. They/we live in the Països Catalans (Catalan Countries), Catalan-speaking areas comprising, among others, Catalunya (Catalonia), Illes Balears (Balearic Islands) and País Valencià (Valencia).
You’ll notice many of them give their country as Andorra, the only independent country where Catalan is the official language, or some place further away, or no country at all, rather than Spain or France or wherever.
Facebook should seriously considering incorporating Països Catalans (Catalan Countries) as a network. Several groups have already been created incorporating this demand.
PS. Please ignore my previous post, which I’ve now edited