
Facebook has 1 billion monthly active users  - bjonathan
https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10100518568346671
======
hugh4life
I'm a few of those active users.

~~~
tatsuke95
And the fact that they still promote MAUs as a growth metric makes me believe
the number even less.

They could hit 1.5 billion tomorrow if a group of hackers got ambitious. The
number is practically meaningless. Unique individual numbers are far lower.

~~~
libber
Your declarative statements unencumbered by any research are fascinating.

What would be a better metric in your mind than MAU? Contrast facebooks MAU to
google pluses "has a google account" metric.

The facebook prospectus also has daily active users of which at last count
there were 483mil.

~~~
tatsuke95
> _"Your declarative statements unencumbered by any research are fascinating"_

Worked for a social gaming company, investigated this _exact_ problem ("How
many of our DAUs are multiple accounts?"). For our game, which had mechanics
that encouraged player-to-player commerce, the number of these fake accounts
was huge: around 40% on DAUs of ~150k. It was clear to me and my co-workers
that this was a big issue, everywhere. But everyone in the space benefits from
saying "1 BILLION USERS!" when you are selling ad reach. Except for those
actually buying ads. Oops.

Moved on to different things, shorted ZNGA in April after the OMGPOP
acquisition, having been privy to this scheme. Have made a decent return,
covering at ~$5, but missed the last two big drops. I'm not particularly
concerned what you choose to believe, because my view has worked out pretty
well for me.

------
samstave
I almost forgot about this: back when MySpace was king, the user profile page
was something to the effect of MySpace.com/profile=0022447

I was trying to judge active users so I used a script to visit each profile
I'd URL and check the "last logged in" date that was a part of everyone's
default profile.

(this was 2006 or 2007 so I'm fuzzy on exacts) the MAU was around 49% of what
MySpace was claiming at th time. So many accounts hadn't logged in in at least
6 months.

I don't have he data files any longer, but I was using it to plot the
actives...

------
tomrod
I call bull. Spam accounts are rampant. Based on my personal experience,
people are beginning to leave. Roughly 20% of my personal friends have left in
the last 6 months for varying reasons. I know I am one datapoint, but without
hard statistics from FB servers it's the best I have.

~~~
papsosouid
Survey numbers certainly support the "facebook is full of shit" idea. There
was a post recently where someone did a poll with google consumer surveys and
found only 42% of US internet users have a facebook account:

[http://diegobasch.com/42-of-us-internet-users-have-a-
faceboo...](http://diegobasch.com/42-of-us-internet-users-have-a-facebook-
account-for-twitter-its-16)

~~~
drumdance
Still, it's an impressive number. Compare that # to the first 10 years of
cable, then remember that Facebook is _all of it_ whereas cable consisted of
lots of independent channels.

~~~
papsosouid
I'm not sure why you would suggest comparing it to cable, I can't imagine up
any way that could make a reasonable or useful analogy. It may well be an
impressive number, but nobody asked if it was impressive, they asked if
facebook lies about their numbers.

~~~
bgilroy26
The internet and cable television are different forms of broadcasting.

~~~
papsosouid
And facebook is not the internet or television, which is why it doesn't make
any sense as an analogy. Comparing how many TV viewers MTV gets to how many
internet users facebook gets would be a reasonable analogy. Comparing how many
internet users facebook gets to how many people have cable is nonsensical.

~~~
bgilroy26
In my opinion, if you are sitting on a marketing budget for a retail product
trying to make decisions, they are important facts to have.

I would say that knowing the absolute reach of as many channels as possible is
important including billboards etc. If you expect a 0.5% conversion rate, as
long as you filter out ones that reach less than a million people a week, all
of your options represent a serious return.

~~~
papsosouid
I have no idea what you are trying to say. You think that making a bad analogy
is an important fact?

~~~
bgilroy26
Facebook and cable have the same customers. That is why it is a good idea to
talk about their respective reach.

~~~
papsosouid
That doesn't make a senseless analogy any less senseless. I didn't say "you
shouldn't talk about how many users facebook has", in fact I talked about how
many they have. I said that the analogy he made doesn't make any sense.
Facebook isn't comparable to cable, it is comparable to a channel.

------
brador
No doubt it's large, but how many are spam accounts? How many are multiple
account holders? How's it measured? Does a simple like button click count as
an activity?

~~~
freyr
How many log in occasionally out of boredom, stare at the newsfeed for a few
seconds, sigh, and log out?

~~~
kijin
Or rather, how many people are permanently logged in but never actually post
anything on FB? For all we know, you might count as an active user if you so
much as visit a third-party web page with some FB trackers on it.

------
Aloisius
I remember reading that Facebook counts anyone who clicks a like button on any
website as being an active user which is certainly b.s. If you can't serve
someone an ad (and that's your primary revenue stream), they aren't an active
user.

Plus, they almost certainly count public page views to Facebook (like the link
above), which means every new non-logged in session gets counted as a new
user. It is totally valid in my opinion to count these, but they are hyper-
inflationary.

~~~
craffert
How is clicking a facebook like button not actively using facebook? I would
think that's kind of the definition of being active (as opposed to passive).

And they don't count non-logged-in users. You have to be logged in and either
visit facebook.com, or click a like button.

~~~
jetti
It is deceiving when using it as a metric to sell more ads. Yes, people may be
liking stuff, but you can like thousands of things a day and not even open the
facebook page, thus not seeing any ads. If they were able to break down like
clicks based on whether somebody is on the site or not, that would be a more
honest approach (not sure if they do this or not already) as you can see if
marketing dollars spent there would be worth it. If many people are liking
stuff that is related to your product/market but never go to Facebook.com to
see ads, then why waste the money?

~~~
csallen
If I'm not mistaken, you buy ads on a cost-per-click or a cost-per-thousand-
views basis. In other words, you only pay when people see or click your ad.
You also choose exactly what audience you'd like to target on FB -- very few
companies are rich enough and broad enough that they want to target the entire
FB userbase.

Long-story short, Facebook's total monthly active user count is largely
irrelevant to individuals purchasing ads.

~~~
Aloisius
You don't need to have more views or clicks. If you claim you have 2 or 3x the
number of monthlies, you charge more per click or view. You'll attract more
advertisers to your site which further drives up the cost of each
advertisement.

In this way, inflating monthlies has a direct effect on ad revenue.

~~~
craffert
This doesn't even make sense. If you are charging per click (or view), you
don't charge more because of number of visitors, you make more because
Revenue=CPC _CTR_ Views (and Views is getting larger).

~~~
papsosouid
Yes they do. The post you are replying to even explained that. If you tell the
world "we have a billion users", more companies will decide to purchase
advertising on your site than if you tell the truth and say "we have 400
million users". More advertisers competing for the same number of page views
means they drive the price per view up, just as any other increase in demand
without an increase in supply will drive up prices.

------
kecebongsoft
The next 1 billion will be really challenging, there are developing countries
like Africa, countries where there are conflicts like Afghanistan, and
countries like Myanmar where corruptions are really high, where infrastructure
such as internet and telcoms are still treated as luxury products, if they can
enter those barriers, the impact will be really big. Nevertheless, I salute
Mark for getting this far.

~~~
jopt
> countries like Africa

Hopefully a typo. For reference Africa comprises ≈54 countries depending on
who's counting and who counts.

But yes, infrastructure will pose a problem. Will it be specifically so for
facebook though? The argument should apply equally to competitors.

~~~
kecebongsoft
Whoops that was my mistake. Sorry!.

------
spaghetti
This astronomical user-base begs the question: why aren't you the most
profitable company on the planet right now? You have the users, the money, the
connections and the engineering talent. So what's the problem?

~~~
jemka
>You have the users, the money, the connections and the engineering talent. So
what's the problem?

Assuming you're looking beyond the simple answer (because they 're not selling
a product/service the majority of their user-base will purchase), I'd say they
suffer from the lack of agility. Facebook's size increases their effort to
implement even the simplest of changes. We've seen how fickle those users are
about little changes and future ones could affect the group in negative and
unintended ways. I'm sure every change is examined to death before
implementation. In contrast, a start-up making changes might lose their early
adopters, but could gain orders of magnitude more users because of that
change. Facebook, however, already has the user-base. Facebook needs to keep
them happy and drastically changing things in the name of profit would
probably send people running. Of course not everyone will run and profit might
increase, but those changes would have to be time consuming just from an
implementation standpoint given their size and now being publicly traded the
desire to keep the investors happy.

~~~
spaghetti
Good point about the lack of agility. Internal politics probably have a
negative impact as well. I could see some team's feature going live for 1% of
users then managers and other internal stake holders endlessly arguing about
the measurements, data etc.

------
phwd
It's interesting to see the average number of friends from 2006 to present has
decreased to around 300 (The last reported number was 305 in 2010 so it could
even be under 300 in 2012).

Maybe Facebook users are being more self ware (privacy conscious) of who they
add as a "friend"?

~~~
shanelja
Maybe people have reached what could be considered their 'critical mass' in
respect to the number of friends.

You can realistically only know a small number of people, and 300 is probably
a good estimate for acquaintances rather than friends, over time you add
people, remove people, fall out with people etc.

In the first few weeks you add more people than ever, then the curve slows
down to 'old' and 'new' friends, in which case the trend slows down as all the
people you used to know have added you.

I know that now, 5 years in to my use of an account, I delete more 'friends'
than I add.

Not because of privacy concerns, mind you, I just realize now that a lot of
the people I added in the early days weren't 'friends', they were just
'people' with whom I had some intangibly vague connection.

~~~
TimGebhardt
You're talking about Dunbar's Number:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number>

"Dunbar's number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with
whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in
which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to
every other person.[1] Proponents assert that numbers larger than this
generally require more restrictive rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain
a stable, cohesive group. No precise value has been proposed for Dunbar's
number. It has been proposed to lie between 100 and 230, with a commonly used
value of 150."

~~~
stroebjo
That's also how Path came up the their maximum number of friends you can add:
[http://service.path.com/customer/portal/articles/659426-why-...](http://service.path.com/customer/portal/articles/659426-why-
can-i-only-share-with-150-people-)

------
_k
I used to have an account on FB but I closed it and it's unlikely I'm going
back. I did create a company page. I'm on Twitter and I'm giving G+ another go
for the third time. iCloud looks interesting and could be a major threat to FB
because I set up a bunch of pages for family just so they could see their
grandchildren. They're on FB for no other reason so iCloud definitely has some
potential there. I'm also more engaged with the Twitter ads than I ever was
with the ads on FB, those ads never interested me. I fully expect FB to copy
Twitter's ad model.

------
msg
I clicked through one of my sister's posts from an email the other day. It had
been a while. I saw a funny graphic on Facebook.

Right after that, Facebook sent me an email. Subject: "Welcome back to
Facebook."

Apparently I'm a reengaged monthly active user!

~~~
moe
You have more friends on facebook than you think!

~~~
personlurking
A person I know added me a few days ago. Today I got around to accepting
it...only she says she didn't add me and that FB must be looking at mutual
friends and when that number is high enough (5-6), they sometimes create an
add. She said she had heard of this happening to a few friends of hers, too.

~~~
scott_s
They've been doing those "People You May Know" things for a while now. She
probably accidentally clicked on "send friend request" when trying to look at
your profile.

~~~
personlurking
That's what I thought but she vehemently denies adding me. Though, yes, I am
open to the idea that upon looking at friends of friends, some unintentional
clicks may have gone unnoticed.

------
shutton
What will be the second site to hit that landmark, does it even exist yet?

~~~
navs
How does google stack up against Facebook in numbers? I don't mean Google plus
specifically but I've always been under the impression that anyone signed up
with Facebook probably has a gmail account.

~~~
k-mcgrady
>> "I've always been under the impression that anyone signed up with Facebook
probably has a gmail account."

Why do you think that (seriously asking)? Gmail didn't become available to the
public until 3 years after Facebook launched (admittedly Facebook was
initially limited to certain groups of people). Before I signed up to Facebook
Hotmail was still very popular with everyone I knew, mainly because they all
used MSN Messenger. It's only been in the last 2/3 years or so I've seen most
of the people I know default to Google when creating an email account. Up
until then Hotmail was all people really new.

~~~
drumdance
Huh? Gmail was announced in April 2004.
[http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2004/04/google-gets-
message-...](http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2004/04/google-gets-message-
launches-gmail.html)

Facebook (or rather, TheFacebook) launched just a few months before at
Harvard.

~~~
k-mcgrady
But it was invite only until February 2007.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gmail>

------
troymc
Another way to spin it: "At most one in seven humans uses Facebook regularly"

------
zxcdw
What's the percentage of (younger) Western adults not using Facebook?

~~~
papsosouid
73%

[http://diegobasch.com/42-of-us-internet-users-have-a-
faceboo...](http://diegobasch.com/42-of-us-internet-users-have-a-facebook-
account-for-twitter-its-16)

------
furyg3
How many of them buy something from/via Facebook?

------
leeskye
<https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=3802752155040>

------
manishsp
After this, what will be facebook's next target?.. 1.5 bn or 2 bn ...
wondering....

~~~
debacle
At this point, it's far easier to double the revenue per user than doubling
the userbase.

------
lampe
i got only about 60 friends on facebook cause i dont wanne have every idiot i
seen once on my "friendslist" (yeah i know i can group them blabla... google
plus has it right)

iam so under average \o/

~~~
viseztrance
Only 60 friends - right there, this is Facebook's problem. These are contacts
not friends. Of course if you really have 60 real life friends, well kudos.

~~~
lampe
yeah that would be great but i dont got 60 REAL friends this i can count on
one hand ;)

------
unipim
A real milestone

------
mkhalil
Everyone knows that Facebook is now a MOM ONLY ZONE.

------
hastur
who cares

~~~
hastur
hahaha, seems like entreporn fanboys don't like when someone puts down
meaningless statistics

and yet, someone has to call the ceasar naked

keep voting down, for me it's karma points well spent

------
feronull
Since they went public they are just looking how to make money and if nothing
change I will probably stop using it..

~~~
shanelja
I disagree, I think that they are just looking to make an impact on the world.

If all they wanted was to make money, then there would be ads all over the
place, instead of the few, limited places at the moment (the right of the main
page area, underneath comments on pictures, etc.)

In all honesty, I don't see why people constantly complain about the ads on
twitter or facebook, do they really effect you _that_ much that you would stop
using the service?

Facebook has 1,000,000,000 users now, that kind of scaling isn't cheap, you
want a large social network with all of your friends which you can use 24/7,
completely free (cost for your internet, etc, aside) and that isn't
sustainable without the website making money somehow. Most people aren't
willing to pay for Facebook, if that was a viable solution then it would be
the Facebook income stream.

Saying "Facebook wants to make money, if this doesn't change, I will stop
using it" is the same as saying "The company which runs the buses in my area
puts ads in it's bus stand, so I'm going to stop standing in it."

Whether we like it or not, Facebook is now an integral part of many peoples
lives, I live in a different country to my family, Facebook lets me chat to
them easily and freely, I could send them a letter instead, but that's subject
the thievery, loss and costs a lot more money.

So Facebook wants more ads on it's site? Who cares? As long as the key
features are still there, 1,000,000,000+ people and it doesn't effect the way
you interact with the site too much, it doesn't make a difference in the end.

~~~
diggan

      I disagree, I think that they are just looking to make an impact on the world.
    

And how can you make a impact on the world without a shitload of money or
knowing someone with a shitload of money?

~~~
jasonlotito
To be fair, _just_ looking to make money doesn't instill one with the desire
to make an impact on the world, but _just_ wanting to make an impact on the
world would require making money.

