Facebook Users Up 89% Over Last Year; Demographic Shift
Nick Gonzalez
33 comments »
Comscore has reported some interesting stats on Facebook, shedding light on the site’s growth after opening up last September and their demographics. Over the past year (May ‘06 - May ‘07), Facebook saw an 89% increase in unique visitors to the site at 26,649,000 uniques, with a 143% increase in page views at 15.8 billion. The site’s stickiness has increased and then tapered off at about 190 minutes per average user.
The site has also seen a demographic shift toward teens and post grads as it moves out of the college crowd. Maybe that’s the reason Robert Scoble is getting so many friends requests.
It is even going to be more impressive in May & June with the momentum of their apps Mashups gaining so much publicity.
A brilliant strategic move
Interesting growth.
If they manage to create new & effective monetization way (other then MS ads) , theses guy’s could have the next big thing on the internet.
it will be interesting to see where they and Myspace will be 2-3 years from now.
Hi Nick,
Can you embed the unique visitors and % in each of the slices of the pie charts? You can’t really make out the shifts in demographics just by looking at it…
I just joined Facebook last month myself. It has received a little more buzz recently, hasn’t it.
Hi Nick and All TC’ers,
Could you please stop talking about Faacebook and social networking for a while?! for christ’s sake this is gettin too much. You guys cover a story every other day that the traffic has increased for some lame social networking site, I’m not sure whats the reasoning behind it. It ceratinly seems to be out of business intrerest if for nothing. Please bring back the old TechCrunch with good content…the fact is who cares if facebook has high growth…as a reader I don’t atleast.
In my opinion, the increasing amount of users in the 12-17 and 35+ demographic may spell some trouble for Facebook. You said yourself “It was originally developed for college and university students but has since been made available to anyone with an email address”. In my own humble opinion, and I know many, many other students share it with me, part of the allure of Facebook was the fact that it was only open to students. It is disheartening to see some immature behavior from younger users, and the very same with older users (See: Spying Parents) but I doubt that students will discontinue use of Facebook, because it has become a staple in campus life. I forsee a slight slow down in the college/university student demographic as more of the other age ranges take over, but I don’t expect anything major. Just don’t forget about all of us students out there who have been with it since the beginning. I wish all the best for facebook, and hope that you continue to experience growth and success within it.
It would be much more interesting to see an actual breakdown of page views by demographic. A lot of mega sites have a fairly broad demographic when it comes to overall visitors (and lumping everyone above 35 into a single demographic is a convenient categorization to say the least.) I can’t help but think the actual page views/time-spent would still skew rather heavily toward the younger demos which typically have far more free time to spend on a social networking site.
FWIW, Comscore released a similar study on Myspace’s growing demographic last year (i.e., I take all these reports with a grain of salt)
http://www.comscore.com/press/.....press=1019
That chart could indicate that the 18-24 year olds are just getting older.
@8 - Very astute! Just remember that you can prove anything with stats
Why don’t you get us some Facebook financial info, not web traffic stats. As we all know, traffic in a SocNet is worthless because of its ineffectiveness for advertisers. If they scrapped their AJAX they’d be one of the highest trafficked websites out there.
@RandomRat: could you please start reading some other lame-ass blog that *doesn’t* cover social networking & the explosion of growth at Facebook?
i’d really like to make sure we keep the quality of the comments (& commenters) up over here, and you’re dragging down the average.
seriously dude: “stop talking about Facebook & social networking”?!? like those aren’t 2 of the most fundamentally interesting & topical stories going on in the blogosphere right now. what a great idea. why not ask mike to start covering more news about IBM, or Procter & Gamble?
get a clue, or leave the party.
@DavidU & AndyMcL: unless most 18-24 year-olds getting older are cloning themselves, i think 100% growth in the last year isn’t explained by cohort aging
Dunno about you, Dave, but this last year’s felt like 5 for me
If Facebook is the new MySpace… what will replace facebook?
http://www.myitthings.com/saar.....415101.htm
In recent weeks and for the last 2 months facebook has grown hugely in the UK . Im 25 and the number of people whom are around my age I know off whom aren’t “Geeks” but have become facebookers and built/spent huge amounts of time on it is incredible.
Boggles my mind.
Interesting stats. The Facebook is growing rapidly.
awesome article.
@randomrat — hey, sorry if you didn’t jump on the social networking bandwagon — is this because nobody wants you on their Top Friends list? cry me a river.
anyway, i think what some of the people have brought up regarding 18-24 year olds getting older is very true.
example: when i was 14, i used to hang out in an AOL chat titled “18-24″ — i’m now 23 years old… and the 18-24 or even 30 yr olds then are most definitely in the 35+ age group… and are actively using myspace, facebook, frienster, whatever
another factor of the growing rate of 35+ year olds on facebook is bc FB is open to anyone, not just college/uni-related. eager and ambitious software developers/companies/vc’s are looking to tap into money-making partnerships—and most likely hope to gain more soc-net credibility by creating profiles… etc. —- example, i work at a company that has created an app for facebook f8 mashup… and well, not all of the guys are exactly… my age
generation y
I was a Junior at Harvard when Facebook took off. I just turned 25. While ppl in the 25+ range have definitely been flocking to facebook, I’m willing to bet that the change here has more to do w/ people like myself aging into the 25+ category, than anything else.
GigaOm’s analysis of this data criticizes this data, due to too many clicks that are necessary to deal with friend requests…
hmmm - no one has mentioned how comScore looks at ISP accounts information to come up with the age data. Therefore, there #s for 35+ are way higher than what they should be.
GigaOM & Agreed are both right. Page views on Social Networks is a meaningless statistic. You can easily configure pages to increase or decrease PGV’s a hell of a lot easier than you can on other basic content sites.
What someone above said about a decrease in college-aged users might be true. Facebook launched near the beginning of my college career in 2004, and it was highly appealing for pretty much every student at the time because it was such a “college” phenomenon. Back then I heard it was open only to some high-tiered colleges, so people in my campus were turned off as soon as Facebook opened up to high schools, and some even back when they were opening to other college campuses. I felt the same too as the years passed by when younger cousins in high school found my now 3-year old Facebook profile documenting my entire college life thus far.
Nevertheless, Facebook opening to the entire world was a great move. I’ve found people around my age in all the different places I’ve moved to, so I assume it’s great for people who immigrated, are Army brats, or the like. Like many others, I am closely watching the demographics + the growth of Facebook because I do believe they are closely related. This generation does have it’s life documented in the growth of the Internet, in my opinion.