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Facebook has 1 billion monthly active users
- feronull 14y agoSince they went public they are just looking how to make money and if nothing change I will probably stop using it..
- pauletienney 14y agoYou are so optimistic ! 1 billion is a f*ing hude mark. Viva Internet !
- feronull 14y agoYes that the only thing that keep me using it. All my friends are there. But they are pushing promoted posts for groups and users, sponsored stories, offers. My news feed is becoming aggregate for ads.. When they went public all the changes was for the stock price.
- pauletienney 14y agoAdBlock Plus ?
- akandiah 14y agoThat does not stop sponsored stories!
- shanelja 14y agoI disagree, I think that they are just looking to make an impact on the world. If all they wanted was to make money, then there would be ads all over the place, instead of the few, limited places at the moment (the right of the main page area, underneath comments on pictures, etc.) In all honesty, I don't see why people constantly complain about the ads on twitter or facebook, do they really effect you that much that you would stop using the service? Facebook has 1,000,000,000 users now, that kind of scaling isn't cheap, you want a large social network with all of your friends which you can use 24/7, completely free (cost for your internet, etc, aside) and that isn't sustainable without the website making money somehow. Most people aren't willing to pay for Facebook, if that was a viable solution then it would be the Facebook income stream. Saying "Facebook wants to make money, if this doesn't change, I will stop using it" is the same as saying "The company which runs the buses in my area puts ads in it's bus stand, so I'm going to stop standing in it." Whether we like it or not, Facebook is now an integral part of many peoples lives, I live in a different country to my family, Facebook lets me chat to them easily and freely, I could send them a letter instead, but that's subject the thievery, loss and costs a lot more money. So Facebook wants more ads on it's site? Who cares? As long as the key features are still there, 1,000,000,000+ people and it doesn't effect the way you interact with the site too much, it doesn't make a difference in the end.
- diggan 14y agoI disagree, I think that they are just looking to make an impact on the world. And how can you make a impact on the world without a shitload of money or knowing someone with a shitload of money?
- jasonlotito 14y agoTo be fair, just looking to make money doesn't instill one with the desire to make an impact on the world, but just wanting to make an impact on the world would require making money.
- papsosouid 14y ago>If all they wanted was to make money, then there would be ads all over the place, instead of the few, limited places at the moment But then people would hate the site even more than they do now, and would leave. They aren't doing it out of some altruistic desire to "change the world", they are just not total morons who are willing to kill their cash cow for a short term profit. >Facebook has 1,000,000,000 users now, that kind of scaling isn't cheap, you want a large social network with all of your friends which you can use 24/7, completely free (cost for your internet, etc, aside) and that isn't sustainable without the website making money somehow Yes it is, there is no reason at all that one company needs to be running it. A distributed social network would work fine.
- brador 14y agoNo doubt it's large, but how many are spam accounts? How many are multiple account holders? How's it measured? Does a simple like button click count as an activity?
- simias 14y agoWon't they have to give a more detailed accounting of users now that they're public? Surely it's a very important thing to know if you hold facebook stock.
- dr_ 14y agoNo. If they could make billions of dollars in revenue with just 100 users, that would be fine with investors.
- edanm 14y agoSo you're saying you honestly believe that how many Facebook users has is not important to Facebook investors? Or are you just taking a valid question that was asked, "will they have to disclose their counting methods", and trying to start a philosophical argument about how to value companies? Because it looks like that's what you're doing.
- dr_ 14y agoThe number of users implies that if they have more users, they will be able to generate more revenue. I'm stating i don't know what their future plans for revenue generation are but, in the end, that's all that's gonna matter.
- wensing 14y agoAs long as their valuation depends on speculation, number of users matters.
- drumdance 14y agoInvestors don't care, but advertisers do.
- phwd 14y agoIt's interesting to see the average number of friends from 2006 to present has decreased to around 300 (The last reported number was 305 in 2010 so it could even be under 300 in 2012). Maybe Facebook users are being more self ware (privacy conscious) of who they add as a "friend"?
- shanelja 14y agoMaybe people have reached what could be considered their 'critical mass' in respect to the number of friends. You can realistically only know a small number of people, and 300 is probably a good estimate for acquaintances rather than friends, over time you add people, remove people, fall out with people etc. In the first few weeks you add more people than ever, then the curve slows down to 'old' and 'new' friends, in which case the trend slows down as all the people you used to know have added you. I know that now, 5 years in to my use of an account, I delete more 'friends' than I add. Not because of privacy concerns, mind you, I just realize now that a lot of the people I added in the early days weren't 'friends', they were just 'people' with whom I had some intangibly vague connection.
- TimGebhardt 14y agoYou're talking about Dunbar's Number: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number "Dunbar's number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person.[1] Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restrictive rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group. No precise value has been proposed for Dunbar's number. It has been proposed to lie between 100 and 230, with a commonly used value of 150."
- shanelja 14y agoThanks for the link, made for interesting reading :)
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- hugh4life 14y agoI'm a few of those active users.
- dhimes 14y agoMy favorite quote today!
- xmpir 14y agome/us too
- tatsuke95 14y agoAnd the fact that they still promote MAUs as a growth metric makes me believe the number even less. They could hit 1.5 billion tomorrow if a group of hackers got ambitious. The number is practically meaningless. Unique individual numbers are far lower.
- samstave 14y agoWouldn't it be great if there were an MAU attack against Facebook where a group built a system to create billions of active accounts to the point where the MAU number was greater than the computing population of earth?
- stephengillie 14y agoYou're asking how long it would take for a hacking group to expand FB to 12 billion accounts?
- samstave 14y agoNot 12 billion - the number just needs to greater than the number of computer/internet users on earth.
- stephengillie 14y agoIf it's close (8 billion), people will likely ignore it as either a rounding/math/counting error, or as "those people who have a 2nd account for their dog".
- hastur 14y agowho cares
- hastur 14y agohahaha, seems like entreporn fanboys don't like when someone puts down meaningless statistics and yet, someone has to call the ceasar naked keep voting down, for me it's karma points well spent
- lampe 14y agoi got only about 60 friends on facebook cause i dont wanne have every idiot i seen once on my "friendslist" (yeah i know i can group them blabla... google plus has it right) iam so under average \o/
- viseztrance 14y agoOnly 60 friends - right there, this is Facebook's problem. These are contacts not friends. Of course if you really have 60 real life friends, well kudos.
- lampe 14y agoyeah that would be great but i dont got 60 REAL friends this i can count on one hand ;)
- Karunamon 14y agoPretty much this - Facebook is a much better place to be once you do two easy things: * Implement a policy of not friending anybody you don't know in real life. * Block any game with "ville" in its name.
- manishsp 14y agoAfter this, what will be facebook's next target?.. 1.5 bn or 2 bn ... wondering....
- kecebongsoft 14y agoThe next 1 billion will be really challenging, there are developing countries like Africa, countries where there are conflicts like Afghanistan, and countries like Myanmar where corruptions are really high, where infrastructure such as internet and telcoms are still treated as luxury products, if they can enter those barriers, the impact will be really big. Nevertheless, I salute Mark for getting this far.
- jopt 14y ago> countries like Africa Hopefully a typo. For reference Africa comprises ≈54 countries depending on who's counting and who counts. But yes, infrastructure will pose a problem. Will it be specifically so for facebook though? The argument should apply equally to competitors.
- kecebongsoft 14y agoWhoops that was my mistake. Sorry!.
- taejo 14y agoAfrica is not a country.
- crucialfelix 14y agoI've got quite a few friends in Zimbabawe and Tanzania that I talk with regularly on Facebook. and just last night we were talking about Myanmar connections who had added us. When I was traveling everybody wanted to link up on FB. One friend lives in Harare's ghetto Mbare and he mainly uses his mobile to post. And many many people use internet cafes all over the world if they don't have a computer. And here's another vision for you: I was on the border of Zambia/Zimbabwe which is a refugee camp (known locally as Baghdad). This little 6 year old girl was running around playing in the back alley and she had a toy cell phone that she was pretending to talk into (sauntering and throwing her hair so I would notice). What do you think she's going to buy as soon as she can ? For many people its the first luxury they buy. Its communication, its their future.
- shutton 14y agoWhat will be the second site to hit that landmark, does it even exist yet?
- navs 14y agoHow does google stack up against Facebook in numbers? I don't mean Google plus specifically but I've always been under the impression that anyone signed up with Facebook probably has a gmail account.
- k-mcgrady 14y ago>> "I've always been under the impression that anyone signed up with Facebook probably has a gmail account." Why do you think that (seriously asking)? Gmail didn't become available to the public until 3 years after Facebook launched (admittedly Facebook was initially limited to certain groups of people). Before I signed up to Facebook Hotmail was still very popular with everyone I knew, mainly because they all used MSN Messenger. It's only been in the last 2/3 years or so I've seen most of the people I know default to Google when creating an email account. Up until then Hotmail was all people really new.
- drumdance 14y agoHuh? Gmail was announced in April 2004. http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2004/04/google-gets-message-launches-gmail.html http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2004/04/google-gets-message-... Facebook (or rather, TheFacebook) launched just a few months before at Harvard.
- k-mcgrady 14y agoBut it was invite only until February 2007. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gmail http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gmail
- shawndumas 14y agoWhat's Yahoo!'s numbers?
- zxcdw 14y agoWhat's the percentage of (younger) Western adults not using Facebook?
- papsosouid 14y ago73% http://diegobasch.com/42-of-us-internet-users-have-a-facebook-account-for-twitter-its-16 http://diegobasch.com/42-of-us-internet-users-have-a-faceboo...
- furyg3 14y agoHow many of them buy something from/via Facebook?
- tomrod 14y agoI call bull. Spam accounts are rampant. Based on my personal experience, people are beginning to leave. Roughly 20% of my personal friends have left in the last 6 months for varying reasons. I know I am one datapoint, but without hard statistics from FB servers it's the best I have.
- papsosouid 14y agoSurvey numbers certainly support the "facebook is full of shit" idea. There was a post recently where someone did a poll with google consumer surveys and found only 42% of US internet users have a facebook account: http://diegobasch.com/42-of-us-internet-users-have-a-facebook-account-for-twitter-its-16 http://diegobasch.com/42-of-us-internet-users-have-a-faceboo...
- mtrimpe 14y agoI wouldn't trust Google consumer surveys that blindly either. I ran a pricing survey there a while ago and a lot of people were willing to pay 11111111111 or 12345 dollars per month.
- drumdance 14y agoStill, it's an impressive number. Compare that # to the first 10 years of cable, then remember that Facebook is all of it whereas cable consisted of lots of independent channels.
- papsosouid 14y agoI'm not sure why you would suggest comparing it to cable, I can't imagine up any way that could make a reasonable or useful analogy. It may well be an impressive number, but nobody asked if it was impressive, they asked if facebook lies about their numbers.
- bgilroy26 14y agoThe internet and cable television are different forms of broadcasting.
- mkhalil 14y agoEveryone knows that Facebook is now a MOM ONLY ZONE.
- troymc 14y agoAnother way to spin it: "At most one in seven humans uses Facebook regularly"
- Aloisius 14y agoI remember reading that Facebook counts anyone who clicks a like button on any website as being an active user which is certainly b.s. If you can't serve someone an ad (and that's your primary revenue stream), they aren't an active user. Plus, they almost certainly count public page views to Facebook (like the link above), which means every new non-logged in session gets counted as a new user. It is totally valid in my opinion to count these, but they are hyper-inflationary.
- kopsai 14y agoBut a user is consciously clicking the like button on a website and I believe this is a good indication that they are active. At some point the user is bound to visit facebook because and that's when you can serve the ad.
- Aloisius 14y agoThen only count them when they visit Facebook. There is absolutely no reason to count them when they are on any other website unless you want to artificially inflate your monthly actives.
- craffert 14y agoHow is clicking a facebook like button not actively using facebook? I would think that's kind of the definition of being active (as opposed to passive). And they don't count non-logged-in users. You have to be logged in and either visit facebook.com, or click a like button.
- jetti 14y agoIt is deceiving when using it as a metric to sell more ads. Yes, people may be liking stuff, but you can like thousands of things a day and not even open the facebook page, thus not seeing any ads. If they were able to break down like clicks based on whether somebody is on the site or not, that would be a more honest approach (not sure if they do this or not already) as you can see if marketing dollars spent there would be worth it. If many people are liking stuff that is related to your product/market but never go to Facebook.com to see ads, then why waste the money?
- spaghetti 14y agoThis astronomical user-base begs the question: why aren't you the most profitable company on the planet right now? You have the users, the money, the connections and the engineering talent. So what's the problem?
- jemka 14y ago>You have the users, the money, the connections and the engineering talent. So what's the problem? Assuming you're looking beyond the simple answer (because they 're not selling a product/service the majority of their user-base will purchase), I'd say they suffer from the lack of agility. Facebook's size increases their effort to implement even the simplest of changes. We've seen how fickle those users are about little changes and future ones could affect the group in negative and unintended ways. I'm sure every change is examined to death before implementation. In contrast, a start-up making changes might lose their early adopters, but could gain orders of magnitude more users because of that change. Facebook, however, already has the user-base. Facebook needs to keep them happy and drastically changing things in the name of profit would probably send people running. Of course not everyone will run and profit might increase, but those changes would have to be time consuming just from an implementation standpoint given their size and now being publicly traded the desire to keep the investors happy.
- spaghetti 14y agoGood point about the lack of agility. Internal politics probably have a negative impact as well. I could see some team's feature going live for 1% of users then managers and other internal stake holders endlessly arguing about the measurements, data etc.
- _k 14y agoI used to have an account on FB but I closed it and it's unlikely I'm going back. I did create a company page. I'm on Twitter and I'm giving G+ another go for the third time. iCloud looks interesting and could be a major threat to FB because I set up a bunch of pages for family just so they could see their grandchildren. They're on FB for no other reason so iCloud definitely has some potential there. I'm also more engaged with the Twitter ads than I ever was with the ads on FB, those ads never interested me. I fully expect FB to copy Twitter's ad model.
- samstave 14y agoI almost forgot about this: back when MySpace was king, the user profile page was something to the effect of MySpace.com/profile=0022447 I was trying to judge active users so I used a script to visit each profile I'd URL and check the "last logged in" date that was a part of everyone's default profile. (this was 2006 or 2007 so I'm fuzzy on exacts) the MAU was around 49% of what MySpace was claiming at th time. So many accounts hadn't logged in in at least 6 months. I don't have he data files any longer, but I was using it to plot the actives...
- msg 14y agoI clicked through one of my sister's posts from an email the other day. It had been a while. I saw a funny graphic on Facebook. Right after that, Facebook sent me an email. Subject: "Welcome back to Facebook." Apparently I'm a reengaged monthly active user!
- moe 14y agoYou have more friends on facebook than you think!
- personlurking 14y agoA person I know added me a few days ago. Today I got around to accepting it...only she says she didn't add me and that FB must be looking at mutual friends and when that number is high enough (5-6), they sometimes create an add. She said she had heard of this happening to a few friends of hers, too.
- scott_s 14y agoThey've been doing those "People You May Know" things for a while now. She probably accidentally clicked on "send friend request" when trying to look at your profile.
- personlurking 14y agoThat's what I thought but she vehemently denies adding me. Though, yes, I am open to the idea that upon looking at friends of friends, some unintentional clicks may have gone unnoticed.
- personlurking 14y agoThat's what I thought but she vehemently denies adding me. Though, yes, I am open to the idea that upon looking at friends of friends, some unintentional clicks may have gone unnoticed.
- unipim 14y agoA real milestone
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- leeskye 14y agohttps://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=3802752155040 https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=3802752155040