Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg just posted a message on the company blog confirming the number of users for the social networking service that’s been floating around for some time now. The blog post, titled ‘200 Million Strong’, says the milestone will effectively be achieved today (no more speculation needed, more than the entire population of Luxembourg).
Zuckerberg goes on with the usual talk about how the service does its part to help change the world by making information sharing easier etc., but it gets interesting again when he embeds a video of a heat map that shows Facebook’s growth since 2004, depicting how quickly people across the world are connecting on the network.
Unfortunately, it can only be viewed and shared on Facebook, but here’s a direct link to the video.
Update: there you go (it’s like magic):
Mark Zuckerberg also points to a new profile page for Facebook for Good, an effort to group all the stories from Facebook users “about how Facebook has helped them give back to their communities, effect change or connect with a distant relative.”
Facebook’s growth keeps on amazing. In January this year, the official number of users was still 150 million, and grew to 175 million in February. That means that a stunning 50 million people signed up for the social network in 2009 alone to date (or 500,000 per day, more than the entire population of Luxembourg).
At the end of last month, we reported that its traffic is going through the roof too, according to recent worldwide comScore data. The data also showed that more than 1 in 4 people with Internet access visited Facebook in February 2009, translated to 276 million monthly unique visitors (or more than twice the size of MySpace’s traffic globally).
As usual, Compete’s traffic data paint a picture of lower visitor numbers for both companies but reports a similar trend.
I wonder how this growth rate compares to others such as MySpace and Twitter. Anyone know?
Follow me now @ http://twitter.com/IanMikutel
Did you even read the article?
FOLLOW ME ON FACEBOOK NOWZSPAM.
I did read down facebook causes nothing but trouble. The trouble ive had in my life over spying. Creepin its called where people watch what people are doing through other peoples walls thats whats wrong with facebook if there wasnt this problem it would be fine . Ive been bullied spied on by peoples friends friends you cannot ask people to change their settings when youve got hundreds of friends. Ive fallen over facebook with 3 so called friends which were never friends people are obsessed to the point where they neglect their children. The other problem with facebook is theres too many applicatiopns too many things to do on it its overwhelming i could go on and on about it . Facebooks a good thing if you have good friends at the end of the day thanks
I think compete info is limited to US only?
From what I have seen on social times Facebook has 90 million US users and twitter has 14 million US users. But I havent seen any total user figures for twitter globally.
http://www.soci...ter-14-million/
Facebook is trash.
I think the only people who still like facebook are the internet equivalent of builders and mcdonalds workers
Patronise much?
And what’s wrong with McDonalds workers? It’s that elitist attitude that got the economy messed up and McDonalds workers making more than laid off hot-shot internet entrepreneurs in foreclosure.
When a site wins with 200 million users and the best thing you can say is they are “trash”, then this mean that you must like things that lose.
What an idiotic comment.
Yeah… at least give the man a pat on the back! Any site that can get 200 million users on it has to be doing something right!
Zuckerberg = jew.
What’s that supposed to mean?
Now that’s a healthy dose of supremacism!
FB is fun for awhile than its time to get back to work. your friends will never pay your bills. builders are very important people.
ConstructionLocator.com – build yourself
Wow, great news. Now if he could just keep his staff around.
“Unfortunately, it can only be viewed and shared on Facebook”
- of course, why would you ever need a site other than Facebook? Isn’t FB the internet? and all these sites like TC part of the World Wide Facebook?
Waiting for the day Zuck proposes www be changed to wwf. More like WTF.
wow, congratulations facebook.
I hope they can turn these visits into money.
Obviously they are, seen how many ads they got on it.
Facebook is going to grow here in the U.S., then internationally and is gonna peak out when alot of the english speaking part of the world is maxed.
Facebook doesn’t attract alot of the international speaking crowd because you need to really customize and be language/culturally sensitive when making a social network for them. You can’t simply translate a page like myspace has learned over the years.
Working on a Japanese social network startup thats the one thing i realized that you have to cater and do things differently in each country. Being first or second doesn’t hurt your cause either lol.
http://twitter.com/netmogul
the translations are done by the users in those locales. any loss of ‘cultural sensitivity’ is upon them.
Kanani, you’re wrong about myspace they have an office in most of their international territories, with localized content. Japan is different from many countries in terms of social networking, you’re painting with pretty broad strokes.
May be it so quickly
Woah, i’m still in the hundreds lool
Anyway facebook will become one of the biggest networks…
That’s an amazing grow in a few months only. I think more than 35% of his users only this year.
Myspace has no response to this grow.
MySpace has nothing to offer. The customized profile page is more nuisance than it’s worth IMHO and the overall feeling isnt cohesive like FB. Their apps feel like spammy throw ins.
I do know FB is harder to learn for new members compared to MySpace
nice piece. might be useful to compare stats on engagement / time on site in addition uniques.
since both companies revenues are largely ad-based, a weighted combination of uniques x engagement might be a good trend metric correlated with revenue (at least in US / major adspend geographies).
didn’t TechCrunch attempt some form of weighted avg metric awhile back? any further thoughts from that perspective?
Not posting my feedback?
Hmm, are they making any profit though or just exercising an unsustainable burn rate?
LOL, profit? No…they sold dollar bills for 40 cents, their. Fund me with 500 million, and I will build a site with 200 million users…
Amen to that! Screw facebook!!!
Their massive funding scheme and huge PR spend to pump up the service is an insult to entrepreneurs.
The only thing facebook accomplished was destroy the art of building great, innovative businesses with small budgets and a dream to grow with a purpose.
Now the plan is; give me 50 million cash and I will bring in 25 million users and who cares about revenue, profit, innovation and value services.
50 Million in February .. that’s wow!
Question is, are they people or just auto-bots?
EM
More likely that people are signing up multiple accounts with different user names etc. I have friends who signed up for another account cos it seems one account couldn’t access some applications (for some strange reason) and the new account could. 200 million may just be the number of accounts.
Yes ofcourse. 100-200millions page views equal to million revenue..
Though I’m not sure their operating costs (servers, bandwidth, people).
Care to share the revenue in nets?
TC posted an article on an estimation how much Facebook spends on operating costs: http://www.tech...rowing-problem/
that is amazing! no wonder why the owner of facebook is one of the world’s richest.
he is not that wealthy, he has little to known liquid cash assets.
That means their cash are already flowing nicely..
A whole lot of growth!
And zero money.
Can someone please explain the economics of these massive social networks?
Looks like despite everyone on fb complaining about recent changes, it may be a factor in increased usage?
@HappyHamster… not quite zero money; they must be making tons from all the ads and selling user demographic info to marketing companies
go back to the previous lay out or you will have 199,999,999 users.
Where’s the FB profitability business model?!?!?!
The long and the short of it continues to roar that Social Media is the front runner in the web 2.0 or 3.0 space
I really think that all the mainstream media coverage must have incubated this development. As pointed out, the 35+ age group is the fastest growing segment. I get the sense that after watching TV shows that desperately mentioned that they “get it” by blurting out “follow us on facebook and twitter” every other sentence like they had some sort of internet turrets’ syndrome caused a lot of the 35+ to take a look at what the hype was.
After they get an account, look up their old school buddies, and send out notifications to all their email contacts it turned into a snowball effect.
I don’t know about everyone else. But I have started coming to terms with the idea of relinquishing my fb account to the constant and bumbling requests by the leading generations; and adding people that are not exactly my close friends (I never got into the stranger collecting that other people do and kept family out of my personal social life).
Facebook, if you are listening…. please allow group privacy policies….. Please!
I don’t want stereotypical grandma seeing certain things, and I don’t want her making classic grandma-like comments to the whole world.
It certainly shows, that site is so s-l-o-o-o-w-w now, it runs pretty much the same speed as myspace. I guess they aren’t that different anymore.
The site crawls and the facebook app for iphone is crap, you can’t post a comment without getting an error “Sorry, there was an error posting your comment”. Except for viewing, it’s useless, much like the site has become.
Account Unavailable
Your account is temporarily unavailable due to site maintenance. It should be available again within a few hours. We apologize for the inconvenience.
…………………………
FAIL
I believe the bad economy has helped in the growth, as the unemployed are turning to social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn to network for next career move. Practically every career coach online and on TV are touting these new ways to find the next job.
true, been getting hit up for jobs by people I barely know and don’t want to friend anyway. Then I feel bad.
here is how most I know use FB:
_______
/ \
/ \_ _ _ _ (sporadic check ins)
/
/
initial excitement at finding old acquaintances then quickly annoyance at the site then real life comes back to occupy their time then they check in once in a while
“Facebook For Good” – sounds like a double entrendre to me, and their attitude reflects it.
Wow, this is amazing. So many people use Facebook, they are the Google of social networking
How about fixing the damn Events and Birthdays notifications? The last thing I want front and center is the worthless “people you may know” and “spotlight” sections. Put birthdays and events back on top and readily accessible.
It’s amazing – I recently had a few status updates about the UI issues. Within minutes the updates had 6+ “likes” each. It’s obvious that users are pissed off and only sticking around because functionality outweighs the inconvenience…for the time being. Earth to Facebook – your UI team has lost its way.
Great collection of stats. Comscore adjusts for cookie problems and seems to be relatively accurate with 250 million figure for active+nonactive Facebook users. Of course, Facebook tracks by userid, which is the best data.
Compete.com tracks USA only and tends to understate the results. Again, this pattern is similarly understated for Facebook use.
Of course, the publisher’s web logs and Google Analytics over-states UU because of cookie problems. http://adecon10...lates-user.html
Would be useful to have one authoritative statement of web traffic that does not require reading the tea leafs.
Weigh in. What will be Facebook’s IPO valuation?
http://www.fili...on-billions/213
200 Million users with no real concrete proven monetization plan, means nothing. Unless of course you are in the business of data collection and than reselling that information to companies like Microsoft and/or the CIA.
Facebook scares me, I rarely use it.
if you’re really scared, why use it at all? honest question.
Finally! 200,000,000. Let’s set the world on fire guessing when or if they’ve already hit 300 million!
Weak! How many boob jobs have they paid for!? MyFreeImplants.com just hit a milestone today too of 400 ladies getting free implants on their social networking site! lol. Now that’s news!
Wondering what the drop rate is now due to redesign.
Impressive, and shocking, growth.
Don’t let Facebook ban users in US embargoed states….It’s unfair!
Obama Says: US can lead better when it listens to other, and know that better solutions may not always come from US.