Facebook Has Added 7 Users a Second for the Last 1,001 Days (and other fun facts)
Here at XA.net/optim.al we’ve been tracking Facebook user growth across a number of dimensions for almost 4 years. I noticed we had done a recent 90-day measurement of growth and then also happened to have a measurement from April 1st, 2009 which is 1,001 days from 12/28/2011 and so, as the New Year and 2012 beckon, we put together this little compendium of facts and figures about Facebook’s user growth.
For the past 1,001 days, Facebook has:
- Added an average of 7 users per second or roughly 600,000 per day / 609 million
- Shown astonishing growth in the developing world, with Brazil and India standing out tremendously…
- Been HUGE in Brazil, which has added 34.8 million users or about 1,447 per hour, with 7.2 million being added in the last 90 days for an even faster rate of 3,343 per hour, on average, or about 0.93 per second. In the last 3 months through 12/28/11, 19% of all users that Facebook has been adding have been from Brazil even though it still only makes up 4.4% of Facebook’s total audience
- Exploded in India, adding 39.7 million user accounts, including almost 5 million in the last 90 days. This means that in the last three months 2,304 users have joined every hour or about 0.64 per second which is the second biggest growth contributor to Facebook. Of all the users joining Facebook since late September, 13% of them are from India. The but here is that although this equates to only 3.4% of India’s total population, Internet penetration is still quite low in the country comparatively speaking (61.4mm in 2009 by the CIA’s count) – but but this also gives a clue as to how growth numbers might be affected were China’s 400 million-plus Internet users actually accessible to Facebook in the future.
- Shown slowing growth overall, with those 7 users per second average increasing from (4/2009 – 11/2009) 6.96/second to (11/2009-7/2010) 8.39/second to (7/2010-3/2011) 7.02/second to (3/2011 to 9/2011) 6.44/second finally to (9/2011 to 12/2011) just 5.00 per second.
- Added over 97 million users in the United States. Nonetheless, while it is the largest Facebook country in the world with 155.7 million users, or about 19.7% of the total FB population, in the last 90 days it has accounted for just 4% of the users added to Facebook. In fact, India and Brazil together have added more users than the other top 32 countries including the US have added combined.
Here’s a chart showing where the largest Facebook user additions by country have come from in the last 1,001 days:
And of course a good way to look at it as well is to consider what percentage of the overall population of these countries their overall Facebook penetration represents. This is not a view of the most-penetrated FB user countries, but just an additional view of the above countries that have added the most users in the last 1,001 days. We believe the Internet penetration figures that are available from sources like the CIA World Factbook to be difficult given they are 2009 at their most recent date of update, so we have not included them in this analysis. For example, they believe the total Internet penetration within Indonesia to be a strangely round number of 20 million users – which seems off given the growth numbers from Facebook even if you were to assume that some of the account numbers might be temporarily inflated. We have, however, included them in our full analysis of this data available to anyone who signs up for our optim.al Data Updates at the bottom of this post. Herewith, that particular view of things:
The growth of Facebook use worldwide is an unprecedented phenomenon. It has been inevitable that the rest of the world would start catching up and exceeding the growth seen in the developed world to date. There is still a LOT of room for further growth and development – 800 million is a big number but with 5 users a second still signing up it’s going to get a lot bigger!
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