Everyone knows that Facebook has become absolutely massive, but it’s easy to lose sight of just how big a number like 250 million is. Buzzpoint, a social media marketing firm based out of Los Angeles, has put together an impressive visualization that shows off just how large Facebook has grown. The company has estimated the current and past Facebook usage statistics using available data and plotted a number of graphs tracking its progress over the last three years. I’ve broken the image (which is quite massive on its own) into a few chunks below, and you can download the whole thing here.
Among the more interesting stats: as of July 15 2009, Facebook had 250 million active users, which would make it the fourth most popular country in the world. Facebook’s top two traffic contributors are the US (by a large margin) and the UK, but in third is Turkey, which didn’t even have a localized version until last year (though English is fairly common there).
In terms of Facebook users as a percentage of a nation’s population, small countries like Iceland and Norway lead the way, each of which has over 40% of their populations on the site. Of the larger nations, Canada is on top, with around 34.37% of its 33.6 million citizens using Facebook
For more interesting stats, take a look at TechCrunch alum Nick Gonzalez’s site CheckFacebook, which maps out some of the site’s most up-to-date demographic data.
1st
(Keep up the good work Facebook and Buzzpoint.)
sorry to jump in, but count me skeptical about that 250M.
i’ve got a bunch of accounts. several of us do. is that factored into the number?
& how many are active?
i’m still impressed with fb but i think there needs to be some deeper analysis of that number.
and, well, some profits.
I agree, also there are privacy concerns. Does the govt have the ability to snoop on your communications. E-mail is pretty secure, but wall posts are open to everyone, as well as photos.
Facebook’s success in Turkey is amazing. Last year, I asked a high-ranked executive why exactly they are so big there.
His answer: “We don’t have a single clue.”
Or in other words, “We don’t give a damn YET”.
Mark Zuck for Prez!
WTF? Are you retarded? What does that have to do with anything here?
INCREDIBLE what these Spanish speakers are doing in the USA:
http://www.clasilistados.org
SPAMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM
Serkan,
You have a Turkish name, so I am not sure whether you are Turkish or not but, I am on annual leave right now and have been visiting my friends/relatives in Turkey for the past 3 weeks. Believe it or not, everyone seems to have a Facebook account here. I tried to stay away from the internet and didn’t take my laptop with me, so I had to visit a couple of internet cafes on my way to Bodrum from Istanbul and every darn computer’s homepage is set to Facebook. I saw people of all ages ranging from 5 to 90 years use it. My mom, dad, grandma, all uncles, aunts… everyone has an account. It really is incredible.
The issue on the other hand is whether Facebook understands this and can take advantage of it. I haven’t seen any initiatives so far.
I forgot to mention one thing. Prior to Facebook’s reign of popularity in Turkey, there used to be a Turkish social network called Yonja. I haven’t lived in Turkey for the past 10 years, so I am not sure of the mechanics of transition from Yonja to Facebook but a lot of people have told me that Facebook apps (and spefically games like Poker) was one of the major reasons why they switched from Yonja to Facebook.
Orkut, another social network extremely popular in South America and some parts of Asia, was also founded by a Turkish Googler.
Good catch, it’s probably the most striking result that they’ve ever had, and it should be well researched.
Yesterday I met a professor from Istanbul Bilgi University who gave me a sneak peek of her 500 pages study of Facebook’s success in Turkey. Looking forward to read it throughly, it will be published next week.
Emre, I really would like to read this study. Can you give the name of the professor?
It seems to me that if Facebook were a country and everyone who uses Facebook moved there, then the US population would be 69m smaller, so Facebook would actually be the 3rd most populous country in the world.
Excellent observation
Marvelous!!!Facebook is really going worldwide than any other social network now.
excatly .. well ..ok .. facebook users move to facebook city.. see you there
Apart frm jokes .. yes it is a grt Achivement for facebook ..as it is really hard to drive users to your site … and Facebook ..more than half of the world is using it …
Cheers,
Daina
“More than half of the world” is an overstatement.
250MM != 3B…
Thank you for using the correct term – populous. TC writers have used the word popular incorrectly a few times recently.
Facebook must be admitted to UN
Hope Facebook will bring better communication among the nations, and bring more freedom to the world citizens.
Freedom as it is like freedom to grow emotionally, financially, spiritually, and physically not like the freedom to stand at the middle of a freeway as sometimes misunderstood.
how do 155mil and 170mil people even fit in nigeria and pakistan?
They live in houses
bombs break them down into smaller pieces
Question you should really ask is ‘How do 300 million people fit in Bangladesh?’ It is a lot smaller than both Pakistan and Nigeria.
The Bangladesh ratio is much worse! It is one of the most heavily populated countries in the world!
Hey, i live in Nigeria and i KNOW that apart from one city – Lagos, the others cities(over 250 of them) are grossly underpopulated. Get facts before you insinuate – Nigeria is a HUGE country
Facebook is growing faster than Twitter I hope and attract almost every age group.
Amazing , Facebook grow to fast and will make a conquer of the social network on the world.
This study not take into account the population of Atlantis or Middle Earth.
So what are “available sources”?
I love this way of visualising the data. It’s remarkable what facebook have achieved in what really is quite a short amount of time. Social networking has and continues to change the world in terms of how information is disseminated and how people relate to one another and form relationships.
Through services like twitter I’ve friended people on face book and, wait for it, in the real world. I’ve found and met people who live in my village, gone sailing with a guy I met on twitter and am meeting another twitter friend at an event in early September.
“Buzzpoint, a social media marketing firm based out of Los Angeles, has put together an impressive visualization that shows off just how large Facebook has grown.”
Not really aesthetically impressive though, to be honest.
Respectfully disagree. This is one of the most polished infographics I’ve seen in a long time.
Interesting: Why don’t Chinese (well there might be a reason why it doesn’t work in China
or Indian or Indonesian people use facebook more? Does Facebook FAIL on mobile / cell phones?
Dunno about Chinese but Indians are big on Orkut. I assume China has a local equivalent that they all rather use (like how they use Baidu instead of Google etc)
If Facebook was a country, maybe QQ would be a country too. So that pushes FB down a spot. And wonder of wonders, it’s profitable. So while the third world Facebook might be quite big, QQ is a developed country with a bigger population. QQ should buy FB and help them make some money. Jokes aside, if QQ was a good company they’d be huge, but the fact that they’re a pretty terrible company shows just how bad FB have been at making money, cos if QQ can do it, anyone can.
+1
QQ is not even close to global. Most of its users are in mainland China, and some in other parts of Asia. Facebook is more globalized than McDonalds. QQ cannot even get close to the global popularity of Facebook. It can dream though.
Doesn’t change the fact that if it were a country it would be bigger than FB, and significantly richer.
The stats results are really amazing. I feel FB has actually invaded and conquered the web world. Hope it would provide best service and reach out to other parts of world too.
IF Facebook was a country it would have longed ago Bankrupted (a statement based on the current FB revenue numbers)
What if Google were a country?
What if Yahoo were a country?
What if Windows Users were a country?
This “countrylization” will have too many overlaps but just look the sheer number.
It blows my mind away. Why are they not making huge money is a big question? What business model they want to have?
They must be planning to encash this mind boggling number
Yeah I’m tired of infographics too.
If Transformers 2 were a country where would it stand. Please let us know web 2.0 visualization experts k thx.
here you go Ivan: http://moviefil...ion-Club-17391/
How many of these 250M are REAL people. How many are just fakes? I have 3 fakes myself I use for testing stuff.
This “if X were a country…” BS is tiring and needs to end.
Do the people at Buzzpoint really have nothing better to do all day?
Wow, that´s huge.
250 million Users. Mark´s vision of 1 billion is gettinger closer. Great Job
Nice to see a firm taking time out of their day to provide this work to us. Cool stuff, Buzzpoint. Very cool stuff, indeed.
The fact that this company isn’t making billions right now boggles my mind.
and.. 100M of them are into mafia wars and another 100M’s are into farmville.. btw, what if these two apps merge it’ll be crazy
It wont take long for it to take the 3rd spot in most populous country chart
Google “Iceland Women” and click on the ‘Silicon Valley Bachelor’ link. Aren’t you glad we’re so “connected” to them now?
Facebook country… I can’t even imagine how it could be, but if it become real, I’d like to move there lol
It’s got some pretty amazing implications for businesses, large and small. http://bit.ly/19mkdQ
Thanks for the great pointers to the most recent data!
A most informative article. Facebook has truly become an integral part of our lives.
Well done, my apprentice.
Am I reading the figures right? The number of Facebook users in India is nearly as much as the population of India. Something wrong there considering only a fraction of Indians have access to the Internet.
English is not common in Turkey. I don’t know the exact rate but non of my relatives speak English. I think the number is much less than 1%.
um.. takes over the world?
Facebook has almost no (worthwhile) presence in Korea and Japan.. two of the most wired and internet savvy countries in the world. meh
I spend a lot of time on both Facebook and Twitter since I’m a full time traveler and writer, and after months of seeing people showing up online at all hours of the day and night, the question occurred to me, “don’t these people have jobs to go to?”, and often the answer is simply, “no”. Of course, I have no statistical data to back up my theory, but my working hypothesis is there is a direct correlation between the boom in social media and the downturn in the economy (unemployment). Lonely people reaching out for human connections, plus they have more time on their hands. At any other time in history, would this have even been possible. Who knows, but I don’t think it would have been quite as big a bang.
nice Canada is leading the way with 35% of its population on Facebook. Its really became a part of our lives up here.
I can totally tell Mark Zuckerberger why Facebook is so popular in Turkey. My people unfortunately are very curious about other people’s life very much and they also enjoy showing off. And facebook is the perfect tool to search others and also to show off with your friends, comments, pictures etc..
But of course Turkish people are not only foreign nation with these habits, so I am also amazed with my people’s ability to defeat language and technology barriers for something they want.
I was reading Mark Zuckerberger’s blog and there were more than 1000 comment. And I am not joking 1 person out of every 5 people was Turkish with no English language skills. They were complaining about English text, they wanted it to be Turkish:)) Still I think we can spend our times better
OH MY GOD, Really this type of info first time see.
http://live-point.net
Interesting to note the jump in Turkey’s users and the slow growth in Canada, do the Canadians use something else or is it because of a small population? Really wonder why.
I like this new site Listota — I guess the idea is not very new, but I love their logo!