Facebooks new advertising features allow people to create targetted advertising campaigns. I took advantage of this feature to uncover some data about Facebook’s user base as I designed a mock campaign, because I’ve been curious to know where its strongest.
Although not all countries are listed below (ie, I have friends in Russia and Serbia whose data I could not fetch), this does give a good indication on users by country. The subtotal of 50 million is about the amount of users I’d expect to be on Facebook; the countries not included are obviously small and would make an immaterial difference. Fifty million users is within the ballpark of what sounds right (sorry, no link, but I read it somewhere), so the breakdown seems pretty complete.
I thought it might also be useful to add the data of under 18 year olds, to show social networking is certainly an adults tool now and not just some teen fad.
Update March 2008: I’ve done a follow up posting on March 2008 numbers
Elias,
This is very interesting (and sneaky). Good work!
Facebook is still fairly new so I imagine that a good percentage of these people are still active users. Over time I suspect that a lot of these ‘users’ will become inactive. Myspace still touts the $170m number which clearly isn’t a fair reflection of the actual number of active users.
One interesting thing I’ve found about Facebook is that it is now my only link to certain people. When I left my old work I didn’t bother collecting email addresses from people because I knew that I could contact them through Facebook. I’ve now resorted to looking up people’s email addresses on Facebook and then emailing them.
That is some very interesting research you have provided here for the numbers of users.
Didnt Facebook start out as a mainly high school and college student user base? You may should your under 18 bracket to show its not a teen fad but really it never was because the majority of people that started using it were college age students. 18-24. So showing the 18+ stat doesnt prove its not a teen fad only that there are a lot of older/young adults on. Just my 2cents worth.
Thought this may be of interest as to the reasoning of facebook and where it may be backed up? http://www.albumoftheday.com/facebook/