Facebook Reaches One Billion Active Users

In a statement released today from Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, at 12.45 PM Pacific time on September 14th the massive social company amassed one billion active users at one time. That’s major for a social networking company and makes it still the most active and widely used network than anything else on the market today.

If you want to take one billion people in perspective, that’s almost 1/6th of the entire planet. The entire population of Africa equals how many people use Facebook at a single time.

The blog post from Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t very long and there wasn’t a huge announcement behind it but he did link to a series of statistics about Facebook since the achievement of one billion active users. Here are the stats from Mark Zuckerber’s post:

One billion – key metrics:

• Facebook reached 1 billion monthly active users on September 14 at 12.45 PM Pacific time.

Since Facebook launched, we’ve seen:

• Over 1.13 trillion likes since launch in February 2009
• 140.3 billion friend connections
• 219 billion photos uploaded – Data was pulled on 9/10/2012, and represents the total # of photos currently on this site – in other words, it excludes deleted photos. If we wanted to include all photos ever uploaded, the estimate we have is 265 billion. Photo uploading launched fall 2005.
• 17 billion location-tagged posts, including check-ins. Includes location-tagged posts as well as check-ins. Data was pulled
• 9/10/2012, and represents total location-tagged posts & check-ins since
• launch of the product in August 2010
• 62.6 million songs have been played 22 billion times – that’s about 210,000 years of music – Data was pulled on 9/11/2012, and represents song plays since the launch of music-listening applications in September 2011

Characteristics of users joining the week Facebook hit 1B:

• The median age of the user is about 22
• The top five countries where people connected from at the time we reached this milestone were Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico and the United States (NOTE: in alphabetical order)
• Facebook now has 600M mobile users

Characteristics of users joining the week Facebook hit 500M users (July 2010):

• The median age of the user at that time was about 23
• Top five countries where people connected from at the time we reached this milestone were Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico, and the United States (NOTE: in alphabetical order)
• Users signing up at this time now have an average of 305 friends

Characteristics of users joining the week we hit 100M (August 2008):

• The median age of the user at that time was about 26
• The top five countries where people connected from at the time we reached this milestone were Chile, France, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States (NOTE: in alphabetical order)
• The user signing up at this time now has an average 334 friends.

Characteristics of users joining the week Facebook hit 50M users (October 2007):

• The median age of the user signing up at this time was about 26
• Top five countries where people connected from at the time we reached this milestone were Australia, Canada, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States (NOTE: in alphabetical order)
• Users signing up at this time now have an average of 321 friends