Earlier this month we wrote about Facebook surpassing 150 million users. If the growth has in fact continued at the same pace, if not a greater pace, the company should register their 160 millionth user today. Alexa suggests that the company’s growth rate has in fact been increasing which means the company could have surpassed 160 million users prior to today.
Facebook has been updating the numbers reported by their advertising platform on a regular basis as reflected by our Facebook demographics tool. Facebook’s reporting combined with our own algorithm would suggest that the company has reached at least 157.8 million if not 160 million. We are expecting Facebook to update their internal estimates within the next couple days to reflect this growth.
I previously posted about Facebook demographics based on market saturation which illustrated Iceland, Canada, Denmark, and Norway as the highest Facebook population by density. As usual, we will continue to track the number of users on Facebook and update those numbers as reflected by the company.
Have you been noticing rapid growth among your own friends?
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I can think of at least 2 reasons "160 million users" doesn't mean there are 160 million individual people are on Facebook:
1) multiple accounts, either using the same name or different names.
2) organizations or other entities registered as users; i.e. I'm "friends" with Hubble Telescope. "Westcoast Vibratory Feeders" just sent me a friend request, which I'll ignore. If this catches on, there could easily be more non-people than people, which I think would be terrible.
Is there any way to estimate the number of these 2 types of "users"?
Comment by David Shatto — January 29, 2009 @ 10:34 am
David – great point, I agree, there can easily be more non-people than people. I am sure there is a way to tabulate; the question is, will facebook allow that information to be public?
And, I agree with you completely, non-people should not have profiles, but rather fan pages. It just makes sense.
Comment by Harold Cabezas — January 29, 2009 @ 11:14 am
All great points, but all numbers reported by relevant competitors will have the same problem.
Since none of us have any concept of the magnitude of these numbers except by comparison to other internet companies, we can take them at face value for comparison purposes.
Comment by Charles — January 29, 2009 @ 3:30 pm
I have definitely seen a surge of people that I know on Facebook…almost to the point where I can't believe it.
Facebook really has gone mainstream.
Comment by Facebook User — January 29, 2009 @ 6:23 pm
To David, Harold and the other commenters:
It is pretty clear that Facebook's user account numbers are mostly real people (99.999%) because Facebook actively deletes user accounts that are not real people (i.e., businesses or people who can't verify their accounts with an e-mail address and in some cases a cell phone number).
Also, Facebook's counts actually reflect Active Users which means they are only including those who have interacted with the site in the last 30 days. This is an incredibly high bar because it automatically purges folks who just checked it out for a while and/or who created a bogus account for a bit of anonymous/fantasy usage. These types of accounts tend to be used for a while and then abandoned. (BTW, I believe that 50% of all Facebook's Active Users interact with the site on a daily basis which is an amazing level of engagement).
In addition, ComScore and other reports, have said that Facebook already had more than 200 million unique visitors (see http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/22/facebook-now.... So, it is pretty clear that Facebook is undercounting its actual number of unique active users.
The other way to confirm that most of these accounts aren't bogus accounts related to companies or brands is the dramatic growth in non-US markets where this type of advertising-oriented usage would be less likely anyway.
For more on the importance of hitting 200 million active users in such a short period of time, take a look at my blog about this:
http://blog.altura.com/facebook-to-hit-200-millio...
Thanks,
Lee Lorenzen
CEO, Altura Ventures
LeeL@altura.com
Comment by Lee Lorenzen — January 30, 2009 @ 8:53 am
Lee,
I highly doubt your claim of 99.999%, how can you know? That gives you a negative image as a serious CEO. Even facebook engineers dare not say that, I think.
Comment by Charlie — February 1, 2009 @ 11:14 am
And how many people will sign up, see how complicated and annoying "new" facebook is, and delete their accounts? And articles say 500,000 UK people left Facebook in January, so that's a start. Facebook doesn't care what its users want and I expect a lot more peple to leave.
Comment by Rose — February 9, 2009 @ 9:26 am