5 ms·

I'm curious to know what the metric is actually measuring. Is it one billion people that hit Facebook.com or used the mobile app? Or is it also counting people

by ljoshua 11y ago

I'm curious to know what the metric is actually measuring. Is it one billion people that hit Facebook.com or used the mobile app? Or is it also counting people that might have triggered a hit just by browsing around sites with Like buttons on them while logged in, but didn't actually use Facebook? To some extent it doesn't matter because it's just such a massive and impressive number, but I'd be curious to know.

austenallred 11y ago
My guess would be 1 billion unique accounts logged in today, via one means or another. Absolutely mind blowing.
- oh_sigh 11y ago
  With approximately 100 million spam accounts, and 200 million shill accounts used for distasteful things like "like"ing Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bushes accounts.
- Phlarp 11y ago
  I wonder how many of those accounts are fake / sockpuppet / astroturf / paid likes
  - austenallred 11y ago
    Again, totally guessing here, but I would guess a negligible minority
    - speeder 11y ago
      I had a GF that worked solely to create fake facebook accounts. She alone had about 15 of them, she worked in a company that had about 10 employees that did the same thing as she did. The company that she worked for, was one of the smallest ones, there are several others that are much, much bigger.
      - doe88 11y ago
        > I had a GF that worked solely to create fake facebook accounts. Yes but did she connect to all of them on monday by a mean or another? I think that's the fact it was on a single day that makes this number impressive.
        speeder 11y ago
        Her fake accounts had as one of the objectives reach 5000 friends (when this happened you could convert it to a page with 5000 followers and sell it to a company). To do this they created a program that searched the internet for pictures of someone in various situations, then prepared a easy-to-use library of photos to be uploaded every "x" period to look like a real person. The account operator (or operators for some particularly prized accounts) would then log-in, post the photo scheduled, and write a post on the fly, the best operators could make the fake account look like a real person, fooling not only other users but bots, tracking software and whatnot. The accounts that looked particularly real were very useful for PR efforts, some of the biggest clients were appliances manufacturers (example of one of them: GE), and one of the uses was for example one day try to distract the public after some bad news about washing machines causing accidents went viral, or try to create a counter-post that is viral too (in the washing machine case it worked, the viral post stopped being viral in 3 or 4 hours, and not even me remember what was the issue with the washing machines).
      - lazaroclapp 11y ago
        Assume the average such company has around 100 employees with 15 fake accounts each, now assume there are 1,000 such companies: that's 1.5 million fake accounts. At this scale, that is "a negligible minority" ;)
        Houshalter 11y ago
        Presumably they only had 15 fake accounts because they put a lot of work into each account. If some company just optimized for quantity over quality, they could get that number up a lot. And if another company used bots instead of employees, they could easily have tens of millions of fake accounts.
    - rabbyte 11y ago
      Since we're all totally guessing here, I feel like I should point out that we're talking about FB scale here. Negligible minority for FB would be many products entire user count.
      - austenallred 11y ago
        Right. 10 million fake accounts is still a negligible amount.
        rabbyte 11y ago
        Well, it's only negligible within context. Nothing is just automatically negligible at scale but within the context of active users for a single day, I agree, it's negligible.
    - user_0001 11y ago
      I would say you are wrong. For a billion users, they need 1/6 of the worlds population. No way do they have that. How many kids under 7? under 5? in the world. Don't have accounts. How many elderly over 80? 70? don't have accounts. What is the % of non-"developed" countries? Not 1/6 Compared to people running multiple accounts (personal / professional/ seo accounts / spam accounts), now that I have heard of. Regardless, they still have a hell of a lot of users, but 1b real, I doubt
  - serve_yay 11y ago
    Do you guys think this is just somehow not possible, or something? It's Facebook.
    - nosuchthing 11y ago
      It's Facebook circa 2015 though.
  - downandout 11y ago
    Probably at least 20%. But is 800M any less significant? It's an insane number.
  - 0x4a42 11y ago
    Who care? Even if it was 1 billion bots loging info FB in one day, it would still be massive.
  - oxfordbiochron 11y ago
    It's probably quite a bit of fake accounts. We did a report on the ad fraud going on and our stats were very high for FB with bots. See Digital Ad Fraud report here. http://oxford-biochron.com/over-88-of-digital-ad-clicks-deemed-fraudulent-new-study-by-oxford-biochronometrics-suggests http://oxford-biochron.com/over-88-of-digital-ad-clicks-deem...
jsprogrammer 11y ago
Leave it to a PR announcement to omit critical details. Unless shown otherwise, I will assume this number includes anyone whom Facebook sent an email to or whom ended up on a page that loaded a script from a Facebook property.
- alanh 11y ago
  Facebook doesn’t measure usage quite so haphazardly. This has been a topic of discussion earlier, and relevant to their SEC / financial filings. Viewing an embedded widget doesn’t count, but clicking it or signing in to an app with Facebook does.
  - jsprogrammer 11y ago
    Well, I don't see Mark claiming any of that in this post. If your machine requests data from Facebook's machine, it's a use of Facebook. There's no way around that. If Facebook sends personalized content in that request, then there really is no argument that this does not constitute a technical use of Facebook. However, in most cases, users are not voluntarily making those requests to Facebook, but are more or less forced into making them by some third party (eg. any site using Facebook for a comments section).
    - res0nat0r 11y ago
      Why does everyone always think Facebook is lying when it comes to these type of things? What good does it serve them to do so? Seems to me it is mainly just due to the fact that most here haven't worked at anything anywhere close to FB scale and can't believe it can actually be true.
      - jsprogrammer 11y ago
        Who thinks they are lying? The same sentence can mean different things to different people depending on what definition is assigned to the words, among other things.
    - 11y ago
serve_yay 11y ago
I don't know but I'm not really inclined to be skeptical of this.
rokhayakebe 11y ago
I understand it as 1B unique users logged in, and not counting logs from same person on different devices as different users.
aristus 11y ago
Back when I worked there, I "audited" the systems that count Facebook's active users. I needed to analyze code efficiency and feature growth over long periods of time, and so needed very accurate user counts in order to subtract user growth. Without going into details / trade secrets: there is more than one system, they can cross-check each other, and if anything it's conservative. You have to perform legit, non-drive-by actions on either the site or the app before you're counted as an active user on a given day.
- tacone 11y ago
  Does that include "Like buttons" and other widgets on third party websites or not?
  - bigtones 11y ago
    Yes this metric counts those too.
- bigtones 11y ago
  They are not talking about active users. The metric quoted was "used Facebook in a single day". I know for a fact that they count any "Like" click or any Facebook comment on any web page on the internet when they quote "used Facebook". It does not mean logged into one of their apps.
  - aristus 11y ago
    I personally audited the entire pipeline, and code, from collection to analysis all the way to the little DAU ("daily active users") graph that informs this number. That experience, and years of working on related data sets inside Facebook, are enough to convince me that the 1B number is legit. If that's not enough for you, well, maybe I can't help that. But I am curious what evidence leads you to believe something different. Serious question, genuinely curious. Edit: to be clear, and IIRC, seeing a Like button is not counted. Actually Liking something, which posts to your news feed, does.
    - 11y ago
the_watcher 11y ago
Facebook actually has an easier way to measure this than most: how many users logged in. I'm not sure if that's how they did this count, but that's how I initially read it.
cLeEOGPw 11y ago
Also missed this information, but it's expected from such a vague post directed at non-tech users. My guess is that they counted the maximum of everything to blow up the number as much as possible - means it is separate user account hits for desktop, separate user account hits for mobile app, for messenger, API hits, etc, everything add up to one big number. Using this methodology it's not that surprising they hit 1 billion, since a single user could trigger up to 4 hits on average day and even non-users that have logged in cookie produces hits. Also it's worth looking into the timing of this announcement. Logically, if Mark is as smart as I think he is, he would use these kind of announcements to boost share value and/or give publicity.

by ljoshua 11y ago

austenallred 11y ago

My guess would be 1 billion unique accounts logged in today, via one means or another. Absolutely mind blowing.

oh_sigh 11y ago
With approximately 100 million spam accounts, and 200 million shill accounts used for distasteful things like "like"ing Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bushes accounts.
Phlarp 11y ago
I wonder how many of those accounts are fake / sockpuppet / astroturf / paid likes
- austenallred 11y ago
  Again, totally guessing here, but I would guess a negligible minority
  - speeder 11y ago
    I had a GF that worked solely to create fake facebook accounts. She alone had about 15 of them, she worked in a company that had about 10 employees that did the same thing as she did. The company that she worked for, was one of the smallest ones, there are several others that are much, much bigger.
    - doe88 11y ago
      > I had a GF that worked solely to create fake facebook accounts. Yes but did she connect to all of them on monday by a mean or another? I think that's the fact it was on a single day that makes this number impressive.
      - speeder 11y ago
        Her fake accounts had as one of the objectives reach 5000 friends (when this happened you could convert it to a page with 5000 followers and sell it to a company). To do this they created a program that searched the internet for pictures of someone in various situations, then prepared a easy-to-use library of photos to be uploaded every "x" period to look like a real person. The account operator (or operators for some particularly prized accounts) would then log-in, post the photo scheduled, and write a post on the fly, the best operators could make the fake account look like a real person, fooling not only other users but bots, tracking software and whatnot. The accounts that looked particularly real were very useful for PR efforts, some of the biggest clients were appliances manufacturers (example of one of them: GE), and one of the uses was for example one day try to distract the public after some bad news about washing machines causing accidents went viral, or try to create a counter-post that is viral too (in the washing machine case it worked, the viral post stopped being viral in 3 or 4 hours, and not even me remember what was the issue with the washing machines).
    - lazaroclapp 11y ago
      Assume the average such company has around 100 employees with 15 fake accounts each, now assume there are 1,000 such companies: that's 1.5 million fake accounts. At this scale, that is "a negligible minority" ;)
      - Houshalter 11y ago
        Presumably they only had 15 fake accounts because they put a lot of work into each account. If some company just optimized for quantity over quality, they could get that number up a lot. And if another company used bots instead of employees, they could easily have tens of millions of fake accounts.
  - rabbyte 11y ago
    Since we're all totally guessing here, I feel like I should point out that we're talking about FB scale here. Negligible minority for FB would be many products entire user count.
    - austenallred 11y ago
      Right. 10 million fake accounts is still a negligible amount.
      - rabbyte 11y ago
        Well, it's only negligible within context. Nothing is just automatically negligible at scale but within the context of active users for a single day, I agree, it's negligible.
  - user_0001 11y ago
    I would say you are wrong. For a billion users, they need 1/6 of the worlds population. No way do they have that. How many kids under 7? under 5? in the world. Don't have accounts. How many elderly over 80? 70? don't have accounts. What is the % of non-"developed" countries? Not 1/6 Compared to people running multiple accounts (personal / professional/ seo accounts / spam accounts), now that I have heard of. Regardless, they still have a hell of a lot of users, but 1b real, I doubt
- serve_yay 11y ago
  Do you guys think this is just somehow not possible, or something? It's Facebook.
  - nosuchthing 11y ago
    It's Facebook circa 2015 though.
- downandout 11y ago
  Probably at least 20%. But is 800M any less significant? It's an insane number.
- 0x4a42 11y ago
  Who care? Even if it was 1 billion bots loging info FB in one day, it would still be massive.
- oxfordbiochron 11y ago
  It's probably quite a bit of fake accounts. We did a report on the ad fraud going on and our stats were very high for FB with bots. See Digital Ad Fraud report here. http://oxford-biochron.com/over-88-of-digital-ad-clicks-deemed-fraudulent-new-study-by-oxford-biochronometrics-suggests http://oxford-biochron.com/over-88-of-digital-ad-clicks-deem...

jsprogrammer 11y ago

Leave it to a PR announcement to omit critical details. Unless shown otherwise, I will assume this number includes anyone whom Facebook sent an email to or whom ended up on a page that loaded a script from a Facebook property.

alanh 11y ago
Facebook doesn’t measure usage quite so haphazardly. This has been a topic of discussion earlier, and relevant to their SEC / financial filings. Viewing an embedded widget doesn’t count, but clicking it or signing in to an app with Facebook does.
- jsprogrammer 11y ago
  Well, I don't see Mark claiming any of that in this post. If your machine requests data from Facebook's machine, it's a use of Facebook. There's no way around that. If Facebook sends personalized content in that request, then there really is no argument that this does not constitute a technical use of Facebook. However, in most cases, users are not voluntarily making those requests to Facebook, but are more or less forced into making them by some third party (eg. any site using Facebook for a comments section).
  - res0nat0r 11y ago
    Why does everyone always think Facebook is lying when it comes to these type of things? What good does it serve them to do so? Seems to me it is mainly just due to the fact that most here haven't worked at anything anywhere close to FB scale and can't believe it can actually be true.
    - jsprogrammer 11y ago
      Who thinks they are lying? The same sentence can mean different things to different people depending on what definition is assigned to the words, among other things.
  - 11y ago

serve_yay 11y ago

I don't know but I'm not really inclined to be skeptical of this.

rokhayakebe 11y ago

I understand it as 1B unique users logged in, and not counting logs from same person on different devices as different users.

aristus 11y ago

Back when I worked there, I "audited" the systems that count Facebook's active users. I needed to analyze code efficiency and feature growth over long periods of time, and so needed very accurate user counts in order to subtract user growth. Without going into details / trade secrets: there is more than one system, they can cross-check each other, and if anything it's conservative. You have to perform legit, non-drive-by actions on either the site or the app before you're counted as an active user on a given day.

tacone 11y ago
Does that include "Like buttons" and other widgets on third party websites or not?
- bigtones 11y ago
  Yes this metric counts those too.
bigtones 11y ago
They are not talking about active users. The metric quoted was "used Facebook in a single day". I know for a fact that they count any "Like" click or any Facebook comment on any web page on the internet when they quote "used Facebook". It does not mean logged into one of their apps.
- aristus 11y ago
  I personally audited the entire pipeline, and code, from collection to analysis all the way to the little DAU ("daily active users") graph that informs this number. That experience, and years of working on related data sets inside Facebook, are enough to convince me that the 1B number is legit. If that's not enough for you, well, maybe I can't help that. But I am curious what evidence leads you to believe something different. Serious question, genuinely curious. Edit: to be clear, and IIRC, seeing a Like button is not counted. Actually Liking something, which posts to your news feed, does.
  - 11y ago

the_watcher 11y ago

Facebook actually has an easier way to measure this than most: how many users logged in. I'm not sure if that's how they did this count, but that's how I initially read it.

cLeEOGPw 11y ago

Also missed this information, but it's expected from such a vague post directed at non-tech users. My guess is that they counted the maximum of everything to blow up the number as much as possible - means it is separate user account hits for desktop, separate user account hits for mobile app, for messenger, API hits, etc, everything add up to one big number. Using this methodology it's not that surprising they hit 1 billion, since a single user could trigger up to 4 hits on average day and even non-users that have logged in cookie produces hits. Also it's worth looking into the timing of this announcement. Logically, if Mark is as smart as I think he is, he would use these kind of announcements to boost share value and/or give publicity.