Facebook crossed the milestone of 500 million active users

Yesterday a significant historical event took place - Facebook crossed the mark of half a billion active users. The company reached this indicator only 5.5 years later since the launch of the service. Five hundred million is a huge number of people from more than 180 countries of the world, where there is Facebook. Where exactly do people live and from where do they more often join the ranks of the largest social network users?

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


Curious statistics leads O'Reilly Radar. According to them, the share of users from Asia has recently increased and continues to grow. To date, it is 17% of all Facebook users.
Africa, another continent, where there is an increase in the number of active users. It is expected that the share of African users will increase significantly over the next year. In terms 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 enough potential for growth, and the company probably has plans to promote the network in Asia and Africa.

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

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

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


Over the past 12 weeks, Facebook has added 1 million active users to 14 countries, including 5 Asian countries.


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

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

According to this data, in MySpace 120 million users and recently its growth has slowed. Twitter is booming and boasts an estimated 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 unavailable to the inhabitants of the Middle Kingdom. The social network Google Orkut, whose users are 52 million people, is very popular in the countries of South America and India.

The Russian service VKontakte takes the 9th place 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