Facebook is working on plans for their 500 million user celebration, projected to take place at some point before the end of June. While we’d expect Facebook to make an announcement in the next couple weeks, an announcement should be expected well before June 25th, when the company would surpass 500 million if growth was currently linear. We’ve spoken with multiple sources that have informed us that plans are underway for the big 500 million user celebration.
While historically the company doesn’t host large celebrations, the company will most definitely toast to the occasion as it should roughly coincide with the three year anniversary of the Facebook Platform taking place in the next couple weeks. Despite the ongoing media-fueled privacy backlash against Facebook, there is still much to celebrate at the fledgling company.
Before the end of this year, the company should near the 600 million user mark and surpass $1 billion in annualized revenue. While the company still faces some risks from competition, the company will be the sole member of the 500 million user league. To think that the company was at 175 million users just over a year ago makes Facebook’s continued growth a dramatic one.
Look for Facebook to make an official announcement about the 500 million active user milestone in the coming weeks.
wow.
If they didn’t count all the extra accounts people made for Farmville neighbors, they wouldn’t be celebrating.
^what Sean said
That is truly incredible. Less than one year ago, they were at 250-million.
how many is that in real people?
Along with all the bot generated accounts used for spamming and inflating “fan” page numbers. The only way they can claim an accurate number would be if it was still restricted to .edu email signup. The asian SNS sites have the same problem but to a lesser degree. And they’ve had 600+ million for years and got “in the game” game before FB and have double the revenue and spend less on ads. And since FB is blocked in China, you can see where those users are staying and they’re going to continue to favor their own platform which is more customizable.
If we assumed the same linear growth for MySpace back from 2006, it should be at over 120 million users now (v. the 70M US users it actually claims to have).
Linear growth, or logarithmic growth, can only be assumed if the platform has no competition and/or they company values its customers. The former may still be true for Facebook (that will change), but the latter definitely isn’t.
Remarkable growth which should weigh considerably when businesses consider the value of establishing a Facebook page.
http://profile.to/star-trading/
We are on the Limit of 5000
Also with different pages.
Congrats!!
This is the best response on the boycott facebook movement happened last week ..
And to me most incredibly is that Facebook counts only users that have logged in at least once within the last 30 days!
All the best
Joern
http://www.strongquickly.com/
As Jörn Steinz says (which contradicts Sean Turvey’s point), Facebook’s 500 million user numbers are probably on the conservative side because their policy is to only count users who log on one or more times in each 30 day period.
In fact, even more amazing is the fact that 50% of Facebook’s users log on EVERY DAY — which is a mind-blowing level of stickiness.
Congrats to Mark and the rest of the Facebook team!!!
(NOTE to Nick: One minor correction is that Skype claims 560 million users and would also be a member of the 500 million club even though they aren’t a direct, full-blown, social networking competitor — see
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Skype-Flaunts-560-Million-Users-Figure-140311.shtml — if your point was that when Facebook reaches 600 million then it will be the only 600 million club member then you are correct because it is doubtful Skype will be able to keep up with Facebook’s growth tragectory).
All the more reason for every business and org to have a solid presence on Facebook via a Fan Page! A simple way to add your most important content to your fan page is Facebook TabSite. A great App using a content manager to customize a tab / welcome page for your fan page.
While 500 million is an amazing number, we must also realize that about 70% of web users are still using it as a read-only medium. Here’s an article that discusses this missing majority.
http://startupmeme.com/the-missing-majority-on-the-web-is-complex-technology-putting-barriers-to-make-people-look-beyond-the-read-only-medium/