Facebook on course to reach 1bn users

The number of people using Facebook has topped half a billion, according to figures from the company on Wednesday, and internet analysts said the network effects driving its growth had put it on course to exceed 1bn comfortably.

Facebook's announcement that it has 500m members came five-and-a-half months after it reached 400m, with growth coming mostly from non-English speaking countries.

Use of the social networking site has spread as users invite their friends to join and spend more of their internet time there, according to analysts.

Over the past year, for example, use of Facebook among Portuguese internet users went from 10 per cent to 63 per cent, typical of the rapid spread of the service across Europe, said Andrew Lipsman of web research firm ComScore.

Ray Valdes, an analyst at Gartner, said: "It's doing a great job of weaving itself into the fabric of the social web."

He added that "internet users are going to have an account with a social network of some sort" and outside China there was a good chance that 80-90 per cent of those would eventually be with Facebook.

In spite of the unease stirred up in some quarters by Facebook's push to make more information about its users public, the company had managed to maintain a balance between advancing its own commercial interests while not antagonising users enough that they considered giving up their accounts, Mr Valdes said.

Figures from ComScore show that Facebook has reached those levels of penetration in some countries, with 92 per cent of the internet population in Turkey visiting the site, 87 per cent in Indonesia and 80 per cent in the UK.

Mr Lipsman said those high figures suggested that even in countries where Facebook was widely used, like the US, with a penetration rate of 67 per cent, there was room for growth.

For its next leg of growth, Facebook has been turning increasingly to the emerging markets and to Asia, where penetration levels are still low.

It has started to look to mobile users rather than the web , for instance by sending a team of engineers to develop a mobile service for Japan, where its penetration rate stands at only 7 per cent.

The company disclosed on Wednesday that its number of users in Brazil, one of the few strongholds of Google's rival Orkut service, had risen to 6m from 1.3m a year ago.

Facebook's member numbers compare to the 932m monthly visitors to Google's search engine and its other sites, including YouTube.

Microsoft draws 789m users, while Yahoo has 633m, according to ComScore, though the fact that Facebook users have accounts with the service gives it a far stronger relationship with them and greater business potential.

Published by: Richard Waters

Published 22nd July, 2010

Add comment