The current issue of Time magazine has a cover article on Facebook, plus coverage of several other social media. Here are some facts about the size, scope and influence of these innovations:
- Began 6 years ago in dorm room of Harvard undergraduate Mark Zuckenberg as a way for Ivy League students to keep tabs on one another
- Will officially log its 500 millionth active citizen in next few weeks.
- If the website were granted terra firma, it would be the world’s third largest country by population.
- The site had 117 million unique visitors in the U.S. in March, since some 70% of its users are in other countries (the Facebook site has been translated into 70 languages so far)
- More than 1 in 4 people who browse the Internet not only have a Facebook account but also have returned to the site within the past 30 days.
- It’s fastest growing demographic is users over 34, who now represent 28%.
- Users share more than 25 billion pieces of information with Facebook each month
- Through the photos people share, Facebook collects nearly 1 billion unique images a week.
- With 48 billion unique images, Facebook houses the world’s largest photo collection.
- Facebook is free to users, making money through its robust ad system flashing 176 billion banner ads at users in the first 3 months of this year, more than any other website
- In first month of its new Open Graph feature (enabling users to flag content on web pages), Facebook almost reached the point where it will process 100 million unique clicks of a Like button each day.
- Searches for “how to delete Facebook” on Google have nearly doubled in volume since the start of this year.
- “What people want isn’t complete privacy. It isn’t that they want secrecy. It’s that they want control over what they share and what they don’t.” – Mark Zuckenberg, Facebook CEO and billionaire, age 26 today.
Social Media Comparisons
- Facebook had 117 million visitors in March in the United States
- MySpace had 42 million
- Twitter had 20 million
- LinkedIn had 14 million
YouTube:
- Only five years old: the beta launch occurred May 2005 (featuring a 19-second shot of co-founder at San Diego zoo).
- The world’s third most visited website after Google and Facebook.
- Users now clock more than 2 billion views every single day.
- Today more video is uploaded to YouTube in 60 days than all three U.S. television networks have created in 60 years.
