I thought that too. I buy that they get thousands of legit users signing up each day, but those numbers are a bit to wild to all be real accounts in my opinion.
albeit not in the "hundreds of thousads per day" ballpark
Hundreds of thousands per day is incredibly low.
Zynga is the largest game developer on facebook and they claim something like 13 million unique dailies.
Facebook is one of the stickiest (the stickiest?) sites around, so i'm sure its 10 - 20% a day of their userbase. For many people facebook has become as integral to their daily lives as pressing the start button on windows.
I was referring to the number of active users (e.g. users that logged in during the last 30 days).
I wonder if that figure grows by hundreds of thousands per day, but the article doesn't give it away.
13mio uniques for zynga gives a ballpark and could be interpreted as facebook having at least that number of active users (probably much more, not everybody plays games). But it's still an order of magnitude to the 200mio figure quoted in the article, thus I'm still none the wiser about whether that was meant to be active users or merely registered users.
They don't provide any definition for active, that's why I say it's meaningless marketing smoke and mirrors.
It makes a big difference whether you define an active user as "has logged in during the last 90 days" versus "last 30 days" or "has a record in our database".
I have no problems believing that they're approaching 1mio registrations/day. But as said, that's a meaningless figure. What I'd really like to know is their churn/retention.