Facebook has crossed the line of 500 million active users

Yesterday, a significant historical event took place - Facebook stepped over the mark of half a billion active users. The company achieved this indicator only 5.5 years after the launch of the service. Five hundred million is a huge number of people from more than 180 countries of the world, those with Facebook. Where exactly do people live and from where more often the ranks of users of the largest social network replenish?

Facebook began its work in 2004 and was able to reach an indicator of 100 million users after the first 2 years, and over the next 2 years the audience increased by more than 4 times. If the growth rate continues, then next year this figure will increase to 1 billion people, and Facebook will be able to catch up with the industry leader Google, whose services are statistically used by every seventh inhabitant of the planet.


Curious statistics are given by O'Reilly Radar. According to them, the share of users from Asia has recently increased and continues to grow. Currently, it makes up 17% of all Facebook users.
Africa, another continent where the number of active users is growing. African users are expected to grow substantially over the next year. From the point of view of market potential, the number of active users from Asia is 2.3%, for Africa this figure is still 1%. Thus, in these regions there is sufficient potential for growth, and the company probably has plans to popularize the network in Asia and Africa.

The distribution of indicators by region in terms of market potential can be seen in the graph below.


The number of users from America and Europe as a percentage has recently been declining, but only due to the increased shares of other regions. Currently, these figures are about 35% and 30%, respectively.

The proportion of users from the age group of 18 to 25 years is still higher in areas outside the United States, especially in Asia, the Middle East, Africa and South America. 14% of US users have crossed the 55-year milestone, the same figure for Asia is only 2%, in European countries and Africa - 6%, South America - 4%.


Over the past 12 weeks, Facebook has joined the ranks of active users for 1 million in 14 countries, including 5 countries in Asia.


Over the same period, South Korea, Iraq, Haiti and Angola became the leading countries in terms of the growth of the number of active users. Russia and Ukraine showed a 20% increase, Belarus - 33%. The least active users for a 12-week period appeared in Peru and Bolivia, where this figure was 17%.

Currently, there are several large social networks, but they are still far from Facebook indicators. Morgan Stanley provides statistics on several of the world's largest social networks.

According to these data, there are 120 million users in MySpace and its growth has recently slowed. Twitter is growing fast and boasts 74 million. The most popular Chinese search engine Baidu has its own social network, which is used by 54 million users, given that Facebook is not available to residents of the Middle Kingdom. The Google Orkut social network, with 52 million users, is very popular in South America and India.

The Russian VKontakte service ranks 9th in the ranking with an indicator of 25 million users. The number of active users of all social networks in the world is already approaching 1 billion.

Source: O'Reilly