An updated map which was recently published by Vincenzo Cosenza illustrates the ongoing global expansion of Facebook. While it has only been eight months since he last published the “World Map Of Social Networks”, the updated map shows Facebook continuing to gain ground over local competitors abroad. While Facebook has yet to take over Brazil, the map shows Facebook overtaking Orkut in India.
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Yesterday, Bangladesh restored access to Facebook,after banning the site for a week following the “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” group controversy. The country has followed in the steps of Pakistan who both banned and reopened access to the site after Facebook decided to censor access to the controversial groups from within Pakistan.
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According to BusinessWeek, Facebook’s advertiser base has quadrupled in the past year. While Facebook is focused on continuing to grow their user base, the company is simultaneously focused on growing the company’s advertising revenue. The largest channel of growth is through performance advertising followed by engagement ads, or large brand advertisers, many sources have estimated. The growth in advertisers is obviously being fueled by the company’s laser focus on increasing its user base.
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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.
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In the first quarter of 2010, Facebook became the largest display advertiser, serving 176.3 billion display ads, versus Yahoo who served 131.6 billion banner ads according to new comScore numbers. The measurement is only of display ads within the company websites, not those included through external networks. As the Wall Street Journal points out, the large reach of Facebook ads has not yet translated into equivalent revenue streams.
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Thanks to a new post-logout mobile promotion by Facebook, the company has seen a jump in overall mobile usage in the past week, most significantly on the iPhone where mobile usage has grown 20 percent. While there could be other reasons for the jump, we’ve noticed that the growth in iPhone usage has coincided with a less significant jump among Blackberry users.
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Facebook is on an expansion spree lately, with the latest expansion taking place in Austin, Texas. Earlier this week, we broke the news that Facebook has opened an office in Hamburg, Germany. The move has been part of a concerted assault against StudiVZ, the German social networking site whom Facebook attempted but failed to acquire in 2008.
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Back in August of 2008 we covered news regarding Facebook attempting to acquire the German competitor Studiverzeichnis before suing the company for being a “knock off.” A couple years later, it appears as though Facebook is in the process of surpassing StudiVZ (if it hasn’t already) and is now opening up an office in Hamburg. Also the investor who purchased StudiVZ has been actively investing in Facebook app developers, in an attempt to diversify their risk.
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Earlier today Facebook announced a partnership with PayPal who will now become a payments provider for Facebook Credits. While it’s easy to see how these services can work together, many tech pundits have continuously speculated about Facebook’s decision to create a massive payments system. Dave Morin, an ex-Facebook employee, even confirmed in 2008 that the company was working on a payments system but didn’t go into specifics. So what does the future hold for Facebook payments?
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The latest statistics from analytics firm Compete.com confirms that Facebook has indeed surpassed Yahoo! as the second largest domestic website. While Alexa data suggested that Facebook surpassed Yahoo! on a global level long ago, Nielsen data released yesterday suggests that Yahoo! still has more unique visitors when considering all properties beyond Yahoo.com.
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