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Facebook directly employs only about 20,658 people — roughly one employee per 100,000 users. Slightly OT, where does the 2b monthly active user statistics come

by a_imho 9y ago

Facebook directly employs only about 20,658 people — roughly one employee per 100,000 users. Slightly OT, where does the 2b monthly active user statistics come from and how was it measured? I could only find Facebook self reported stats and it is not clear what do they mean by users, and most articles seem to use user/account/person interchangeably.

nl 9y ago
FB measure's "Active Users" is someone who logs in and uses Facebook in that time period. That seems a relatively honest metric and I haven't seen any substantial criticism of it (unlike FB's video metrics). OTOH Twitter's definition of an "Active User" is laughable: an account must simply follow 30 other Twitter accounts and must also be followed by one-third of the accounts it follows to qualify as an active user. [1] https://www.fool.com/investing/2016/11/08/monthly-active-users-maus-how-do-facebook-twitter.aspx https://www.fool.com/investing/2016/11/08/monthly-active-use...
dredmorbius 9y ago
I've made some direct and indirect measures of user activity on various platforms. I looked at active public-posting G+ activity in January of 2015, and estimated about 4-6 million people matching that classification, based off of a sampling from the G+ sitemap files: https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq Stone Temple Consulting expanded that sample 10x (to 500k profiles) and didn't cheap out as I had on the sampling (I used a single sitemap file after various tests suggested that the sitemap files themselves were sufficiently randomly constructed), and pretty much fully confirmed my findings, as well as extended the analysis to look at a few other possible explanations. They found 3.5 million users with 50+ posts ever and also posted within the past 30 days: https://www.stonetemple.com/real-numbers-for-the-activity-on-google-plus/ https://www.stonetemple.com/real-numbers-for-the-activity-on... I will note that this is G+ and not Facebook. I did another analysis, looking at content posted online as determined through selected keyword searches, limited to domains, and using Google's reported result count as an indicator of total results. There are numerous possible issues with that methodology, though the errors should be reasonably consistent. Basically, I looked for a common English word ("this"), a set of probable indicators for substantive conversation (the Foreign Policy "Top 100 Global Thinkers" list from 2015), and an arbitrarily selected string suggesting less-than-substantive conversation "kim kardashian". I searched for these across roughly 100 domains, TLDs, CCTLDs, etc. https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/tracking_the_conversation_fp_global_100_thinkers/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/trackin... Facebook reported 2.6 billion results for "this", which should be a rough proxy for total public user posts. Twitter was about 1.2 billion. Reddit and G+ about 1/10th as much: 120k and 160k, roughly. That would suggest Facebook has at a public posting level at least 10x the volume of G+ -- something like 30-50 million accounts. I also calculated an FP/1000 score (FP top 100 results per 1,000 pages), and ... somewhere in my records ... an FP:KK ratio -- the relative ratio of FP top 100 results per mention of Ms. Kardashian. Metafilter, Wordpress, and Reddit all ranked quite highly on that last. I also looked at similar scores for media sites (Financial Times and The Economist do well), alternative media (generally better than mainstream), educational, and other classifications (Harvard has an impressive online presence, along with several other private schools -- major public universities such as the University of California ranked surprisingly low compared to expectations).

by a_imho 9y ago

nl 9y ago

FB measure's "Active Users" is someone who logs in and uses Facebook in that time period. That seems a relatively honest metric and I haven't seen any substantial criticism of it (unlike FB's video metrics). OTOH Twitter's definition of an "Active User" is laughable: an account must simply follow 30 other Twitter accounts and must also be followed by one-third of the accounts it follows to qualify as an active user. [1] https://www.fool.com/investing/2016/11/08/monthly-active-users-maus-how-do-facebook-twitter.aspx https://www.fool.com/investing/2016/11/08/monthly-active-use...

dredmorbius 9y ago

I've made some direct and indirect measures of user activity on various platforms. I looked at active public-posting G+ activity in January of 2015, and estimated about 4-6 million people matching that classification, based off of a sampling from the G+ sitemap files: https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq Stone Temple Consulting expanded that sample 10x (to 500k profiles) and didn't cheap out as I had on the sampling (I used a single sitemap file after various tests suggested that the sitemap files themselves were sufficiently randomly constructed), and pretty much fully confirmed my findings, as well as extended the analysis to look at a few other possible explanations. They found 3.5 million users with 50+ posts ever and also posted within the past 30 days: https://www.stonetemple.com/real-numbers-for-the-activity-on-google-plus/ https://www.stonetemple.com/real-numbers-for-the-activity-on... I will note that this is G+ and not Facebook. I did another analysis, looking at content posted online as determined through selected keyword searches, limited to domains, and using Google's reported result count as an indicator of total results. There are numerous possible issues with that methodology, though the errors should be reasonably consistent. Basically, I looked for a common English word ("this"), a set of probable indicators for substantive conversation (the Foreign Policy "Top 100 Global Thinkers" list from 2015), and an arbitrarily selected string suggesting less-than-substantive conversation "kim kardashian". I searched for these across roughly 100 domains, TLDs, CCTLDs, etc. https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/tracking_the_conversation_fp_global_100_thinkers/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/trackin... Facebook reported 2.6 billion results for "this", which should be a rough proxy for total public user posts. Twitter was about 1.2 billion. Reddit and G+ about 1/10th as much: 120k and 160k, roughly. That would suggest Facebook has at a public posting level at least 10x the volume of G+ -- something like 30-50 million accounts. I also calculated an FP/1000 score (FP top 100 results per 1,000 pages), and ... somewhere in my records ... an FP:KK ratio -- the relative ratio of FP top 100 results per mention of Ms. Kardashian. Metafilter, Wordpress, and Reddit all ranked quite highly on that last. I also looked at similar scores for media sites (Financial Times and The Economist do well), alternative media (generally better than mainstream), educational, and other classifications (Harvard has an impressive online presence, along with several other private schools -- major public universities such as the University of California ranked surprisingly low compared to expectations).