Facebook has more active users visiting in a single month than most countries have in their populations.
Not too long ago, the world’s population reached approximately seven billion people. This is a enormous number, but one that experts were predicting for quite some time. Facebook’s growth, on the other hand, has unexpectedly grown by leaps and bounds ever since the social network first launched in 2004. Now Mark Zuckerberg has announced that Facebook hosts a staggering one billion active users, meaning that roughly 1 out of every 7 people on Earth use Facebook.
“This morning, there are more than one billion people using Facebook actively each month,” Zuckerberg announced on his Facebook timeline. “Helping a billion people connect is amazing, humbling and by far the thing I am most proud of in my life. I am committed to working every day to make Facebook better for you, and hopefully together one day we will be able to connect the rest of the world too.”
Facebook is celebrating with the release of the above video, which compares its service to common technological fixtures like chairs, doorbells, or airplanes. The concept may seem a bit silly at first, but considering how widely available Facebook has become on computers, cell phones, tablets, and even videogame consoles, the company might have a point.
What’s really fascinating to me is that the one billion figure isn’t of the total number of Facebook profiles. One billion is the number of unique individuals who logged into Facebook in the past month, which should filter out most deceased users, fake profiles, and timelines created for your pets. Now compare that to Twitter, which suffers similar troubles with joke profiles but still serves approximately 100 million users a month. I suspect we’ve reached the point that bored office workers simply aren’t enough to explain away Facebook’s popularity anymore.
Source: Mark Zuckerberg, via Eurogamer
