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November 21, 2007

Facebook Is Almost 2/3 Women (and other stats)

Michael Arrington

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A blogger named Paul Francis went to the trouble of gathering Facebook user data via an advertiser tool that facilitates audience targeting. He pulled user numbers for the top countries, broken down by male/female.

The data set is here. The tool shows a total of 42,966,780 members in the top 31 countries. The U.S. leads with just over 18 million users, followed by the UK (6.8m), Canada (6.7m), Australia (1.9m) and Turkey (1.6m).

Forty percent of U.S. users are male, compared to 36% overall. Men looking for love may want to try Ireland or China, where 73% and 72% of users are female, respectively. Other than the U.S., which has the highest percentage of males, the lowest percentage of female users is in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, UAE and Egypt.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 21st, 2007 at 9:58 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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  1. the bootstrap economist

    November 21st, 2007 at 10:09 pm

    Nielsen wishes that it’s demographic targeting was as accurate as Facebook’s.

  2. Rasmussen

    November 21st, 2007 at 10:16 pm

    I question whether that really is the top 31 countries data.

    I don’t see Denmark in the top 31 countries and I’m sure they have as much users as Norway, for example.

  3. Jeff Liu

    November 21st, 2007 at 10:25 pm

    Hum..
    I would like to see a demography for “active” user and application provider.

  4. Ree Tanjuatco

    November 21st, 2007 at 10:44 pm

    And how can they monetize this again?

  5. Prostate Cancer Cause

    November 21st, 2007 at 10:46 pm

    No need to monetize when you have have Microsoft as your sugar daddy.

  6. Antje Wilsch

    November 21st, 2007 at 10:47 pm

    5 of those accounts are mine, did I skew the #’s?? :)

  7. Jonathan Norris

    November 21st, 2007 at 10:49 pm

    Very interesting statistics, that means that just over 20% of Canadians have a facebook profile…. amazing when you think about it 1 in every 5 Canadians have a facebook profile. Compare that to the US with about 6% and the UK with about 11%.

  8. Ryan Spahn

    November 21st, 2007 at 11:47 pm

    Cool and I know they dig remote wake up communication more then us dudes, but hey we follow them :)

  9. Paul Francis

    November 21st, 2007 at 11:54 pm

    I was wondering about Denmark and a couple of other countries when I was pulling this together. These are the countries available through the ad platform so it’s perfectly feasible that for legal or other reasons some countries aren’t present. Based on the info that was available I’d say that the list is pretty representative. Good point on the ‘active’ vs ‘inactive’ accounts though. No indicators for that!

  10. Jason Hall

    November 22nd, 2007 at 12:00 am

    I did a few of these charts when Facebook Flyers Pro came out:

    http://www.imjasonh.com/search/label/facebook

  11. David

    November 22nd, 2007 at 12:07 am

    Bear in mind that some people have not listed their gender on Facebook, and there could be a greater inherent propensity to do so amongst females, thus skewing these averages. But otherwise is pretty interesting to see the top 31 countries, thanks!

  12. SEO Mash

    November 22nd, 2007 at 12:19 am

    Just like with MySpace, Facebook is beginning to become filled up with spam profiles from marketers and believe me that NOBODY creates male profiles for marketing purposes.

  13. Hollywood Celeb

    November 22nd, 2007 at 12:33 am

    facebook is quite diffcult than Orkut, What u say ?

  14. Rajeev

    November 22nd, 2007 at 12:35 am

    Cool Info.

    http://tekno-world.blogspot.com

  15. MikeW

    November 22nd, 2007 at 1:08 am

    I give thanks to TechCrunch for its abundance of Facebook postings.

  16. Jean-Marie Le Ray

    November 22nd, 2007 at 1:38 am

    Old stats! As of november 5th, the total in the top 31 countries was of 46,402,120 members : http://adscriptum.blogspot.com.....k-ads.html
    see at the end of the post
    Now it’s probably over 50 million.
    Jean-Marie

  17. James

    November 22nd, 2007 at 1:48 am

    man, i think MA is the worst writer on this blog.

  18. Derrick

    November 22nd, 2007 at 1:51 am

    Singapore only has 4 million people yet it has the 15th highest number of facebook members? Wow.

  19. Paul Francis

    November 22nd, 2007 at 2:13 am

    @Jean-Marie - the stats were pulled today, but has it been pointed out, this does not represent all FB members. Certainly people of indeterminate sex, lower ranking countries and some ‘missing’ countries would infer the full membership # is higher. Interesting that the female ratio stat is reasonably consistent for those countries that are represented though.

    As to any deeper meanings to this .. there probably aren’t any .. I just figured it was an interesting exercise and had a few minutes to spare :-)

  20. MG Siegler

    November 22nd, 2007 at 2:18 am

    Pretty much exactly on target with the data Rapleaf sent out a few weeks ago:

    http://www.parislemon.com/2007.....-data.html

  21. Jean-Marie Le Ray

    November 22nd, 2007 at 2:31 am

    @ Paul Francis

    Global numbers change but I think it doesn’t matter too much for male and female ratio, which remains an interessant data.
    Here are fresher stats: http://www.viralblog.com/2007/.....7-million/
    Jean-Marie

  22. Ric

    November 22nd, 2007 at 2:35 am

    Facebook! Oh geez… just ejaculated.

  23. Zuckenburg

    November 22nd, 2007 at 4:06 am

    Ric, please behave. We make a lot of money from this data. Thank you.

  24. elegance

    November 22nd, 2007 at 4:34 am

    so thats why my app was denied

    tinyurl.com/2zpbgt

  25. Mario Mansour

    November 22nd, 2007 at 5:21 am

    I’m not surprised at all to see a female dominance in facebook or any other social network afterall women in general just love to TALK.

    And about the active vs inactive users: If it is possible to pull out such information, I wouldn’t expect less than an 80% overall for female users.

    Thank you

  26. Alex

    November 22nd, 2007 at 6:34 am

    Something is seriously wrong with his statistics !

    I went and checked for example Israel : 195,000
    40% Male
    35% Female

    and his dataset tells
    30% Male
    70% Female

  27. Sunil

    November 22nd, 2007 at 6:53 am

    Most spammers create profiles with gender as female. And also, they will have too many such profiles… That must have made a difference… ;)

  28. 77Lab

    November 22nd, 2007 at 7:13 am

    This ‘researcher’ simply checked the total amount of users, checked how many of those had registered as ‘male’ and concluded that everyone else was female in true 5 second research fashion. Those Facebook users that did not register their sex are counted towards the female demographic group here, making these results basically completely worthless.

    A quick view at the Facebook Ad system learns that there seem to be more registered women overall, however this could just mean men don’t really like to register their sex.

  29. Antje Wilsch

    November 22nd, 2007 at 7:27 am

    @Mario if painting with broad brushstrokes like you apparently do - if all women love to talk then all men like to troll for big boobs, so would be more male eyeballs (even if they’re just cruising). Let me guess-you came to this genuis conclusion because you “help people succeed in telecom” where most of your clients are women. Right.

  30. francois Covillard

    November 22nd, 2007 at 9:47 am

    I received statistics about users of Facebook and MySpace in New York City , San Francisco and Boise Idaho . it has nothing to do with what it said here . For Instance In NY men are 52.2%.

  31. rob

    November 22nd, 2007 at 10:01 am

    I broke it down to show percentage of country population a while back. The leaders:

    22% of Canada
    18% of Norway
    10% of UK

    http://tinyurl.com/22jnu5

  32. Meanwhile..the blogosphere goes nuts over Auto-OptIn

    November 22nd, 2007 at 10:32 am

    Where is the news about the uproar beacon is causing? I think it is quite relevant, and certainly as newsworthy.

    Must be a reason to downplay/not cover it.

  33. Ryan

    November 22nd, 2007 at 12:33 pm

    I pulled some data from the tool when it launched and found interesting age stats:

    In the US:
    - Over 50% of users are 20 or younger
    - Over 90% of users are 28 or younger
    - Less than 5% of users are over 35 years old

    Not surprising, but Facebook still has a ways to go to become a network for the masses.

  34. Paul Francis

    November 22nd, 2007 at 2:13 pm

    @77Lab (#28) - yep, you gotta love statistics done in a few spare minutes :-)

    I didn’t actually realise that you could choose to be non-gender specific on FB! I’ve re-run the numbers choosing specifically male or female. There’s an updated chart at the link below. As I mention in the accompanying post .. I wonder whether non-specific genders also give an indication to inactivity?

    Here’s the update:

    http://midnightexcess.wordpres.....an-update/

  35. Amyloo

    November 22nd, 2007 at 5:43 pm

    Somebody commented that women may be more likely to specify gender. I got nothing to back it up, but personally I often resent seeing a radio field for gender on every form I fill out. A lot of times it doesn’t seem relevant. Maybe for market research, but maybe not to display if you’re talking about a business purpose.

  36. Paul M

    November 22nd, 2007 at 10:22 pm

    I had written something on Facebook poll feature, can be found here…

    http://thechinagame.com/2007/1.....nto-china/

  37. Andrew F

    November 22nd, 2007 at 10:45 pm

    Yea I mean facebook is great and all but it is kinda a woman thing.

    For an update check http://www.vfork.org

  38. Holiday Cash

    November 22nd, 2007 at 11:16 pm

    Im not sure about the results of that. Its not going to be very exact. What is obvious here is that there is a good many women on facebook and other social oriented sites. Didn’t need a study to confirm this fact. Its not a stereotype, its just what all the women I know do on the internet.

  39. Yuval

    November 22nd, 2007 at 11:29 pm

    In the “Israel” FB network numbers went up from about 5k (1.1% of the Jewish population) to 200k in just 2 months. This aggressive market introduction is in part due to the herd mentality of a more tightly-knit society than the rest of the western world.

    This would explain Turkey ranking high - and if I’m right it means India will have its own “hockey stick” usage spike in the near future. I don’t know what penetration the Internet has there, but I suspect it will happen when FB usage is at 1% of that - or even less. I’ve sat in numerous Internet cafes in India, and saw that many Indians have hundreds (!) of IM contacts. I got the impression these talkative people are in touch with most of them…

  40. business

    November 23rd, 2007 at 12:40 am

    I would suspect spammers and automated profile creation scripts may have an influence on the guy to girl ratio.

  41. g.bush

    November 23rd, 2007 at 3:16 am

    1/2 of America is made up of 50% of Americans

  42. OPEN GIGA

    November 23rd, 2007 at 3:30 am

    cool and informative post …

    thanks

  43. Sharat Jaswal

    November 23rd, 2007 at 4:21 am

    It’s a good data catch here. But i guess FaceBook ain’t just that popular in countries like India. Atleast not yet.
    Majority of Indians get a hang of it a little late than others. But once they know about it….BOOM, the traffic and contents for that site multiplies ten folds. Orkut is one example which became popular among everyone in India since last couple of years only.
    India’s 3,xxx,xxx members shall in no time becopme 3xx,xxx,xxx.

  44. Guille

    November 23rd, 2007 at 8:15 am

    The answer to this mistery are just MEN: Many boys hungry for girls open “femenine” accounts in Facebox, Hi5, Tagged, etc., stealing pics from flickr, webshots, etc in order to appear atractive girls loking for another girls just for confident friendship and so on. Some are easy to discover because of the studio-photographs, or excesive “thruthfullness”. “Not boys allowed” when not necessarily self-defined as “lesbians”. this “technique” is particularly popular in latinamerican countries.

  45. themystical

    November 23rd, 2007 at 2:05 pm

    What is this facebook you are speaking of? j/k

    Well I’m with Guille.

  46. mmm

    November 23rd, 2007 at 2:34 pm

    facebook is really useful ?

  47. Martin Streek

    November 23rd, 2007 at 10:56 pm

    I work for a radio station and work in night clubs in Toronto, Canada and we have seen a drastic decrease in numbers of people attending all clubs in our market. Some people wonder where have the people gone…my theory is that sites like Facebook are creating the new “meet people” places. Guys don’t need clubs to meet girls like they used to…think about it…cover charge, cost of drinks, hassles at the bar by bouncers/staff/other clientele, getting home safely after drinking…it’s way easier to meet girls with a click of the mouse…and those girls connecting on the net seem to be more approachable than the ones in bars…
    The times are a changing!

  48. amoiist

    November 28th, 2007 at 12:08 am

    Oh! It’s unthinkable that the users of facebook are mainly the animals who have breasts.

  49. dan

    December 8th, 2007 at 6:05 pm

    can someone run a report to see how many of those are cheerleaders? please. i’m serious

  50. Personal Development for the Book Smart

    December 9th, 2007 at 8:02 am

    lol @ dan

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