I have decided to read an article based on social networking. Instead of reading the whole thing however, as it is much too big, I have chosen to look at the global phenomenon that is Facebook. I have focused in on the part that examines the statistics of its first two years.
Facebook was founded in February 2004 by a Harvard University student named Mark Zuckerburg. It was initially only available to other students at the University. However it finally became available to all in September 2006. Since then, it has grown exponentially and in 2008 it had over 140 million users worldwide, (now that number has risen to over 400million!). As of June 2008, Facebook became the largest social network with a reach of 132 million users. From the end of 2008, it got a 35% jump. The majority of its success has been in English-speaking world, in particular Canada, the US and the UK. Only recently has Facebook stretched out to non-English speaking countries, of which there were over 20 at the beginning of 2008, with that number now grown massively.
Here are some interesting statistics from 2008 fueling this phenomenon.
(2008 was the year Facebook began to gross almost half a billion in yearly revenue.)
- Since January 2007, Facebook has had an average of 250,000 new registrations per day, resulting in an average of 3% weekly growth.
- Its active users are doubling every 6 months and more than half of all active users visit the site daily.
- The fastest growing demographic is the 25 years old and older and more than half of the users are now outside of college.
- Comscore revealed that people spend an average of 20 minutes per day on the site. Facebook’s wealth of applications are often credited as a major factor in its success:
- It is the number one photo sharing application on the web, with more than 14 million photos being uploaded daily.
- There have been over 52,000 applications built on the Facebook platform, and over 100 are added every day.
- Over 95% of all members have used at least one of the applications.
I find it amazing how just a young university student sitting in front of his computer screen can make a social networking site from scratch, and make it become such a global phenomenon. Mark Zuckerburg is now worth over a billion and his income increases rapidly annually. This article really opened my eyes to the unbelievable popularity that there is out there for facebook. The figures provided, taking the amount of people joining the site, and their time spent using it, is truly astonishing.
These figures are two years old, so if you want to look at the breath taking popularity that facebook holds today, here is a useful site:
