Facebook updates its official user numbers periodically on a statistics page that currently says 175 million users. They say that they update it every 25 million users, but many of us have long suspected that they may trail by much more than that.
So how many users does Facebook really have? Check out this video (which we’ve clipped above), where Facebook developer Wei Zhu seems unsure how many users they’re allowed to say they have, until someone official steps in and corrects him with “200 million.”
Zhu says Facebook has “250 or 60 million users,” then says “280.” At that point someone off frame says “200″ in an official voice, which Zhu then sticks to. But he doesn’t look like he’s happy about it.
Comscore, which if anything tends to under report user numbers for most sites, says that Facebook had 276 million monthly visitors in February. Active users and monthly visitors aren’t the same thing, but they’re close, and with a closed site like Facebook, they should be very close.
If Facebook has far more than 175 (or 200) million users, why aren’t they proudly announcing it? Perhaps because of all of the speculation on Facebook’s absurd growth over the last year. Specifically, all that growth is leading to outside analysis of Facebook’s costs, and when they might need more money.
Conspiracy theory or a coverup to hide the true costs of running Facebook? You decide.
Update: Zhu comments below, effectively neutering the coverup theory:
Michael,
I really just made a stupid mistake when I said “250-260 million users” instead of “150-160 million” 
. There is no conspiracy of any sort. I normally remember the number correctly, though.
Oh wait. I was in the middle of a bad cold when I gave the talk and am still resting at home today. It must have been the cold.
Wei
idk it seems just like a guy who just wants to be sure he was reporting the right numbers. if anything i always thought they inflated their numbers to seem bigger then they really were.
I’ve found that most employees at most startups know their user numbers cold.
Yeah, I completely agree you on that one Mike.
In my personal experience if they don’t know them cold, they are damn close, not 80 million off.
Well most employees at startups also know the difference between *real* users and *total* users which is what Wei was most likely talking about. They can tell this using simple methods like usage patterns that do not coincide with 99% of user base. In either case, they are not lying, it’s just uncertainty about which number they think the audience is interested in.
Michael,
I really just made a stupid mistake when I said “250-260 million users” instead of “150-160 million”
. There is no conspiracy of any sort. I normally remember the number correctly, though.
Oh wait. I was in the middle of a bad cold when I gave the talk and am still resting at home today. It must have been the cold.
Wei
It appears Wei’s struggle with the English language did not help the situation. When he says “Oh wait…” I think what he meant to say or should have said was “By the way, I was in the middle of a bad cold…” or “Also, I was in the middle of a bad cold….”
“Oh wait..” made it sound kind of fishy. I don’t think Wei meant to come across that way.
@Bres,
I think Wei was just trying to inject a little humor. Note he said “Oh wait.”, then ended with “It must have been the cold”.
People, is possible to believe that there really is nothing interesting here?
Good save Nik.
Regardless of whether Wei meant 150-160 or 250-260, he was still 40-50 million off from the 200 million figure his colleague wanted him to say.
The question is: why were you 40-50 million off. Please explain truthfully.
I mean he was 40 to 60 million off, depending on how you look at it. I didn’t mean 50-60 (now that was honestly a stupid mistake on my part)
I think most of accounts could be just for spam purposes created by evils. Most account are still not in use might be..
http://www.smartbloggerz.com
Who really considers Facebook a ’startup’ anymore? When does a company stop being a ’startup’? 5 years? 10 years? One billion in revenue? Five billion? Facebook doesn’t seem to qualify as a ’startup’ in the same sense most people tend to use the word – a few people starting something together in the proverbial garage.
They may adjust for duplicate accounts. I know people who have 2, so they can check on what their profile pages look like to another person, or so they can just have different identities. For tha ladiez, ya know.
Or maybe if they had any brains, they would use the tools already provided by facebook that provide both of those functions.
I think one thing is that the “175 million users” number refers to active users, i.e. users who login once a month. There could be 250 million+ total users.
a.k.a. “registrations”
I think it is out of the question that facebook is a runaway success in terms of attracting and retaining users, so they don’t really have to prove anything in that department.
What they have to prove still is that they can make money with their enormous user base (I have no doubt that they will on the long run). When it comes to making $$ the cost of running the business is – drum roll – am major factor.
If they need more cash from investors anytime soon then i is smart to low ball the cost and to avoid exposing the cost explosion through exponential growth in order to keep the evaluation up.
Makes sense to me. The question is if the kind of investors that are able to join the party are still truly concerned that FB is going to make money one way or the other. My guess is that its all about getting the most bang (equity) for the buck on both sides.
Perhaps 50-60 million accounts are not real users?
** Curious **
I know it sounds crazy but reporting the number of users on a system is very subjective.
At the lowest level is # of active users that engaged with the application for the last 30 days. At the highest level you have total accounts created to date which is the highest number.
The same user might have joined the system, deleted his account and gone back.
Most people at startup know the number at the high end because that represents the “rows on the database”, but they are far from what a business person what consider the # of users of the system.
Totally agree with this comment, as a developer myself.
I believe facebook is right now at 200 million or a little above. I doubt if they are actively understating the figure for “active users” by which they mean people who have logged on in the last 30 days. If they are, it is not by 60-80 million. Frankly, I don’t think they are so paranoid about what people think about their finances that they would misreport this figure simply in order not to seem to be financially needy.
http://www.face...efacebookeffect
“lately”? HA! I don’t think ANYTHING has changed about how TechCrunch has done reporting. At the same time, I think there is nothing wrong with how Arrington & Co. find facts and report them.
I like their style but I don’t think things have changed in my opinion.
I’m actually waiting for someone to put a blog post up that shows everything TC has gotten wrong but I’m pretty sure there isn’t A LOT of things Arrington has called that ended up being wrong. Someone correct me.
Hmm. that was a reply to someone’s absurd claim about TC reporting but it looks like their comment was deleted. Either way, my comment and opinion still remains.
Yes, Techcrunch removes any comment that calls into question their journalistic standards because:
a) Techcrunch is not journalism.
b) Techcrunch has no standards
But 300 posts of flame bait is all good if it serves the politics…
In support of your point b), I believe the title of this post should be “Is Facebook Purposely Lowballing Its Official User Numbers?”
Hate to be the grammar police, but “Purposefully” does not have the same meaning as “Purposely”.
http://wiki.ans...nd_purposefully
It’s a challenge to come up with a number.
On twitter, massive numbers of people are creating fake accounts with fake followers and followings. Most of the web celebrities with 50,000 have hundreds of bogus followers. One real celebrity actually used thousands of fake followers to boast their appearance of popularity.
How many users does Twitter or Facebook have? It’s anyone’s guess.
This reminds me of Hotmail back when they got bought. Supposedly they had 300K users. I knew lots of folks who 10 or so accounts. So was it really 300K users?
I would believe that Twitter would have thousands of fake users. I don’t think facebook has the same kind of problem though. But I could be wrong.
Wake up and Smell the Coffee…
I had over one thousand fake friends on FB without trying terribly hard.
Maybe this explains why Facebook’s servers seem too slow so frequently.
Whether it’s 200, or 280 million, it’s sad how little money they make on that many users
One way they could benefit from stating lower than actual users (other than financial incentive) would be able to control growth statics. Some would say why would you want to control growth statics especially by under reporting your numbers?
PR
By controlling public perception of growth they can use there buffer of unreported users when actual growth does not meet expectations.
So when grown in new markets takes longer than expected their public face allows for them to be more confident. While yes this may deceive the public it is also a reassurance for investors (if they know) by knowing that the public sustained growth influences public perception enticing those who have yet joined to get on the bandwagon.
That voice that says “200; let’s go with that” was Mike Schroepfer.
“Active users and monthly visitors aren’t the same thing, but they’re close, and with a closed site like Facebook, they should be very close.”
No way, I’ve had multiple fake accounts, have no active account, and end up on facebook a lot via googling…
your weird though.
his weird?
I’ve found that it is always best to give the most conservative numbers to the public. It’s better for business that TC posts a story speculation that your traffic is doing better than you say than worse.
@David Kirkpatrick put it very eloquontly.
I have seen Wei present many times and believe he is honest. Its true that startups know their number but they also track all kinds of metrics so he may have many different numbers in his head – total, page views, international, US, daily actives etc so its possible to mix them.
How much is the finances going to change by 80K more users, but its amazing to see a whole story made of this!
well, it’s 80 million, not 80,000, but i agree that there’s no reason for wei to have fudged the numbers. but the way he presented it suggested there was a real number and an official number, and he got mixed up.
There could be a real number, and an official number. But it could be nothing more insidious than wanting to play it safe, use a conservative definition of “what counts as a user,” and only spout number publicly which they feel sure of. That’s it.
To presume they’re keeping a lid on the number because the number translates to server costs which makes them seem desperate for cash… I mean, I see your logical thread there, but it’s a pretty paranoid read.
I personally don’t believe that Facebook has anywhere near the eyeballs across the site as they think/advertise. I have around 100 ‘friends’ on Facebook and I reckon that more than half of them never really visit the site after their initial sign-up.
Only a small percentage of my friends appear to be Facebook junkies – updating constantly.
This raises the question of how many users ‘really ‘ visit Facebook on a regular basis – and what percentage of those users ever bother to interact with the ads on the site. Not very many I suspect.
People use Facebook to keep in touch with friends – not to view ads. And because of the way the interactions occur on the site I believe that the vast majority of users never even ’see’ the ads.
If this is the case then its a death-nail situation for Facebook. If they can’t generate $ effectively through advertising then I don’t see how they will last more than another few years – if that. The social network space is fickle – users will jump across to the next big thing in a very short space of time. I really don’t think there is any user loyalty in this area – at all.
Yeah but how old are you?
FYI – I’m 41, worked in the advertising industry for years and I’m Australian. What difference does it make?
Because your 100 “friends” don’t seem to be so active, then there is no way Facebook could have the number of active users that they say they do?
Riiiiight.
Maybe you forgot to notice WHERE Facebook is growing? Hint: it’s not the good ole USA.
I’m just figuring that I’m about average. Look, any company … read ANY COMPANY … that does not make a profit but continues to make huge monthly losses will not survive. This is just plain common sense.
Just because the are experiencing rapid growth means nothing. Shit, I could build a web site like FB and offer everything for free too – but whats the point?
I often fall into the same trap, thinking that because people don’t post stuff for large periods of time that they *must* be inactive. Later on when you see them in real life, they reference something you posted a while back.
A lot of people are passive most of the time.
For example, I haven’t posted anything to facebook in at least 2 weeks, though I check it multiple times a day.
@chris,
I’d just like to point out that I have 766 friends, 99% of whom I know personally, and I’d say at least 70% of whom are very active on facebook. I generally only add people or accept requests when I’ve had some sort of meaningful in-person interaction with them. In addition, I know plenty of people with twice that number of friends who I’m sure have a very similar policy as mine.
I’m not pointing this out to brag. Instead, I’d like to show that there are, in fact, people who do use it quite a bit. My situation is definitely not representative of the general population being that I’m in college and in a fraternity, where meeting 20-30 new people every weekend is not uncommon. Though my case may not represent everyone, I’d say that your case probably doesn’t make for a good example either.
In a similar analogy, Twitter seems to be all the rage lately, but in my experience it’s popular for older generations. I know approximately 5 people that use twitter. Even those 5 people rarely use it, if ever. I wouldn’t say that this means the site rarely gets any use.
In conclusion to this long winded comment, I do not doubt Facebook’s user base. Among college and high school kids, it seems to be the standard for telecommunication (aside from texting maybe). As for other segments of the population, it is catching on rapidly.
Facebook was very popular and was of great utility while I was in college. Once I get a job and start working though, the situation changes dramatically. I barely go to Facebook once a week, and it seems to me that friends I know well barely go there too. The ones who keep updating status and pics are the ones who still in school. It seems to me that once you’re out of school, Fb will be less and less a factor. To me it seems to be a nuisance after college life is over.
For every one of your friends that posts actively, you should assume 9 more of them are simply quietly reading other people’s updates. That’s the nature of just about every form of publish/subscribe mechanism that’s ever been tried. They almost all end up with about 10% of the publishers/writers/whatever creating 100% of the content.
J
Like any business, there are active users and those that are inactive. Perhaps the figures are correct with including those.
What a dumb post. Slow news day.
It might be due to part of some strategy to hide the figures from their Competitors or done deliberately to cause doubt amongst them … who knows what they are up to ???
I think that it was just a honest mistake by the Facebook employee. It’s fair to assume that your users and unique visitors would be close given that the site’s not open however, as ComScore itself admits on the site “Cookie deletion can cause dramatic inflation in site-server counts of unique visitors” and when you take out the duplicate and dummy accounts, that number comes down even more. I worked at a company where they took off similar millions because of pressure to report more accurate numbers from legal and financial folks. As FB gets ready for the next round of financing or get acquired, it will need to start reporting the *real* numbers and that’s my theory on why we’re seeing them revert to more conservative estimates. PS: I am curious, why is Facebook still considered a startup? Is it because it’s still privately funded or other?
Well I would think that if your advertising revenue was static or stable and your user base increases then the ARPU is going to fall dramatically. Depending on what ticks your inverstors boxes that may be a relevant figure for them . In fact the ARPU may fall to such a low number that it almost appears as zero. That adds weight to the end of advertising as we know it.
I would love their approach if this is true – hype is one, modesty is another – but being able to avoid accurate speculation is a completely different ball game.
So if everything is totally aboveboard and public, why is the “official” number still different than the one Wei reported in his comment here?
The main problem of the Web 2.0 is that they measure success by total number of users. They should measure success by utility.
As Thomas Edison used to say: “Anything that won’t sell, I don’t want to invent. Its sale is proof of utility, and utility is success. “
zzz
Just because there is space for words doesn’t mean it’s necessary to fill.
This same post on a unknown blog would be rightfully ignored.
http://youtube.com/befryxell
I wouldnt feel competly robbed by watching your tutorial if you had showed me some actual utility of the dodge and burn tools. But instead you stole 2:36 of my life.
Also, what was going on with your voice? Were you huffing regrigerator coolant or something?
If you make want to make it up to me, go do a tutorial with a picture of some manga art that lacks any shading, but is already colored. Put some masks abount the edges of the details then use the dodge and burn tools to introduce some shading and make the picture really pop.
Also, you should get something like Vegas Video(I dont know what you would use on the mac), and reedit your movies using the Ken Burns Effects to really show off what you were doing.
Finally, what was that first google image search you did to get that sexy BBW shot in google images??? Also, have you tried live image search? It works a lot better than google images.
this is a marketing story pushing facebook connect cause it’s failing;
280 Million visitors?
how could facebook PR,confuse there own data collecting,aren’t they use “there Google analytic properly,?it is free so ,I think they should installed immediately to gather and measure and target there market share in the web world
No, I think they’re probably doing the right thing and reporting active members. How many members does MySpace report that probably haven’t logged in in months or years.
Try the best home page
In a recent phone interview I had with Facebook (recent as in less than a week ago), they guy quoted 175m as the number of active users. He went on to define active as having done something on the site within the past 30 days.
What dreck.
Facebook sells ad space. More users = more eyeballs = higher ad revenue to Facebook.
They have zero incentive to under-report the number of users on the site.
Well I’m surprised because no-one I know really uses it any more. I have 70-80 “friends” on there and from that number:
1) no-one uses it every day anymore,
2) only about 5 people seem to use it every week
3) about 40 seem to use it once a month to just check in.
The rest seem to have left.
It was exciting to start with but there is a reason that most people don’t stay in contact with acquaintances from their past, i.e. they didn’t get on with them enough to invest their time and energy in, so why bother now?
It seems most people tire of it. My real friends, as opposed to my FB pseudo friends, contact me on my cell phone! FB is for fake friends… hence why most people give up on it.
FB is over. Twitter will last for a bit.
The problem is that most social networking sites based on “statuses” are for the egocentric to report on how exciting their lives are to their pretend friends.
Sure there are some real friends on their, but the word “friend” has been watered down a lot I think for these sites?
Friend can mean anything from:
1) Best friend
2) Friend
3) Ex-school friend
4) Some person you met once through a friend of a friend but who you don’t really have anything in common with whatsoever.
4) A complete stranger who added you as a friend
1) and 2) great… but let’s be honest unless you’re naive REAL friends rarely goes above 4 or 5 in number.
Also I don’t think there’s a conspiracy… more just another case of the guy / gal at the top being out of touch (nothing new there). The boss rarely knows the 100% situation, they only usually know a half of it.
e.g. the salesman are the first to spot a problem, then the technical guys… the CEO is the last to know the important stuff, even though they like to think differently… no-one sensible tells the CEO the full truth otherwise they might get the blame!!!
Time to play the song “Always the last to know” By Del Amitri
Yes but if people have 2 or more accounts then it dosn’t actually mean then that there are 250 million people, just 250 million accounts. If everyone has 2 account for example then there are only 125 million people (real people) on Facebook.
Take away the hundreds of Barrack O Bama profiles and what’s left.
And dose Facebook take note of deactivation numbers? Type ‘facebook’ and ‘deactivate’ into Twitter search. You’ll get a shock.
Type ‘Facebook’ and ‘Deactivate’ or ‘Deactivated’ into Twitter. once a day sometime. How come Facebook does not count deactivations? Or what about people with more than one account. I have no doubt there are 300 million profiles set up. Facebook isn’t popular, people are popular. But I don’t think there are 300 million actual people on there. I alone have more than one profile, how many others?