Facebook Reaches 1 Billion Monthly Active Users

-Medianama:

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced yesterday that Facebook has crossed one billion monthly active users, up from 955 million monthly active users as of June 2012. Zuckerberg said that this milestone was reached on September 14 at 12.45pm Pacific Time (1.15 am India Standard time on September 15).

While Zuckerberg didn’t reveal any breakdown of the users across geographies, Facebook had previously stated that India has 59 million monthly active users as of June 30, 2012.

Along with this announcement, Facebook also released (pdf) a fact sheet which offered some interesting statistics about the company. The company claims to have 600 million monthly active mobile users, up from 543 million monthly active mobile users in June 2012. It also claims to have generated over 1.13 trillion likes since February 2009, seen 140.3 billion friend connections and uploaded 219 billion photos (excluding deleted photos), as of September 10, 2012. The company noted that if the deleted photos are included, then the number goes up to an estimated 265 billion photos.

In addition, Facebook also claims to have seen 17 billion location-tagged posts (including check-ins) since the product launch in August 2010 till September 2012 and 62.6 million songs have been played 22 billion times since the launch of music-playing apps on Facebook in September 2011 till September 2012.

The company stated that the top five countries for the social network in alphabetical order are – Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico and the United States and the average age of a Facebook user is about 22.

Fake profiles?: While Facebook didn’t reveal how many of its one billion accounts are fake, it had previously noted in a 10-Q filing with the SEC that around 8.7% (around 83 million) of its 955 million users are fake, of which 4.8% (around 46 million) are duplicate accounts, 2.4% are user-misclassified accounts i.e. users have created profiles for businesses and non-human entities like animals instead of creating pages and 1.5% are undesirable accounts, which has been created for spamming and other purposes which violate Facebook’s terms of services.

The company had also noted that the number of fake accounts is significantly higher in developing nations like Indonesia and Turkey and lesser in developed nations like the United States and Australia. A few days back, Facebook had stated that it had started deleting fake profiles.

Previous milestones: Facebook noted that it had reached 25 million users in January 2006, going up to 50 million users in October 2007, 100 million users in August 2008, 200 million users in April 2009, 300 million in September 2009, 400 million in February 2010, 500 million users in July 2010. At the time of filing the IPO, the company had 845 million users, of which India accounted for 46 million users.

Facebook also revealed that a Facebook user had an average 598 friends in January 2006, going down to 321 friends in October 2007, 334 friends in August 2008 and 305 friends in July 2010.

Brand Campaign: On this occasion, Facebook also announced a new global brand campaign targeting Facebook users in 13 countries including Brazil, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Philippines, Russia, Spain, UK, and the United States. The company noted that the ad will be translated into 12 different languages.