Facebook's insane numbers

by Carlos Menezes

20 million members compared to 10 million six months ago, of which an estimated 60% visit daily. $200 million for granting Microsoft exclusive rights to sell banner ads and sponsored links. $1 billion allegedly quoted as a selling price to Yahoo!. It goes without saying that CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, must be a happy man.

Ok, so I had to blog about this sooner or later. It's not exactly new, and I gather that anyone who's reading this right now already knows about it, but the phenomenon that is Facebook demands at least one post on our blog.

According to this VentureBeat article by Eric Eldon the site gets up to 1.5 billion page views a day. That's a number that I had to check twice to believe. The enormity of it still doesn't feel natural. What's even more staggering is the rate at which it’s growing - almost a 50% increase in page views from last month.

I remember hearing about Facebook a while ago and dismissing it as just another social networking site. I normally get a lot of invites from friends to join sites such as Zorpia or LinkedIn. Most of the time I pay the site a visit and escape before joining the community. On other occasions I sign up as more of a formality than anything else and then proceed to forget about it. Just over a month ago I got an invite for Facebook and decided to join, attracted mostly by the free photo-sharing that I had been scoping out Flickr at the time. Today all but one of my close friends are registered (he's depressed because his work just restricted his Internet use) and I've made contact with mates that I hadn't heard from in years.

I'm sure that the site is giving employers around the world some serious headaches. With the ever increasing number of Facebook addicts I'd be interested in seeing some numbers showing how Facebook has dented workplace productivity. One of my friends insists on treating Facebook like Twitter, making live updates from her phone every time something remotely socially significant happens.

Though among all of these figures, the one that stands out the most for me is the fact that Facebook currently hosts 1.3 billion photos. Flexible privacy settings allow users to dictate who is able to view their photos and users are able to untag themselves from pics posted by other users.

What really shows the site's success is that it's proving to be popular among the 30something market as well as the typical younger MySpace / LiveJournal user. It really looks like it's going to develop into an extremely useful application for everyday life – whether the emphasis will be placed on photo-sharing, social planning or some other feature is still unknown. I can't see people “growing out” of Facebook as easily as they might from MySpace. I'm sure that varsity students visit the site much more regularly than their older, employed counterparts, but everyone should be able to find the usefulness in remaining in simple contact with all of their friends.

With our narcissistic nature I believe that one feature that will ensure that people keep on coming back to the site is the email notification. Nothing quite like receiving an email saying that your friend has tagged you in a Facebook photo album titled “Drunken Mating Pics” to get you to log on in record time.
With a plethora of applications currently under development, including one that allows users to generate slideshows and another that involves a partnership with a rival to the Internet job search engine Monster, Facebook looks like it's ready to grow from strength to strength.

So, anybody got any bets as to who's going to end up writing the cheque for the ownership of Facebook?

2007/04/05 | permalink | comments (0) | trackbacks (0)

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