Facebook Statistics

Today we pulled up good old Alexa rankings and we want to share what we found. Facebook has finally passed mySpace in monthly pageviews. It looks like they are pretty even as it has crossed back over the line (with mySpace leading again). With the growth trajectory of facebook however, we can expect that facebook may take the lead for good. That is unless myspace does something amazing to stimulate their growth.

We think the facebook platform and social graph is a lot more solid than mySpace. For one, facebook's "real people" social graphs are much more long term. You get your friends linked in and no one is really going anywhere. With mySpace, we get bored easily. For one, you don't really have to reveal who you are and your "friends" are much more superficial. It is kind of a race for fake friends on mySpace. Facebook, you add your real friends more slowly but it seems like more sustainable long term growth as new people get invited and then expand their "real life" social graphs.

That is our take on things anyway.

You might find this interesting.. facebook is now number 4 in the world for page views per month (in September 2007), of ALL sites!  Only Yahoo!, MySpace and Google top facebook now. 

The numbers are from comScore Media Metrix (but we got the graph from Valleywag's Orkut article as we don't have a comScore account! Thx Valleywag).

Also, a surprise, Google's Orkut is number 5 just after facebook.  If we combine Google and Orkut (Google owns Orkut) then Google becomes number one with approx 67 billion page views, then Yahoo, MySpace and then our beloved facebook would come in number 3.  Or we could also combine Live.com and MSN (both Microsoft) and facebook moves back to number 4.  Which ever way you dice the numbers, facebook is serving up the fourth most page views in the world, each and every month.  Impressive. 

Following up on the last post, we know there is a huge race race going on between the social networking sites. We decided to do a little rundown on five of the main competitors and their page view stats from Alexa.

MySpace . With more than 200 million users and with one of the highest usage minutes per day, myspace is the leader (ok this is disputed by many but lets give them the benefit for now). As you can see it is also the leader in page views. For now, that is. Facebook is catching up very quickly and if the trends continue it will be a matter of months before facebook will overtake myspace. The myspace application platform has been announced now and we think developers aren't going to be able to resist the chance to get access to 200 million users. Even if the site is flash, tacky and horrible looking. 200 million pairs of eyes. Wow.

Bebo . Can't see their stats? ‘Nuff said. Ok, no seriously, they are the flat yellow line at the bottom. Although it doesn't look rosey for bebo from the page view stats, they have a huge following in the UK and they claims to be the largest social networking site in the there, Ireland and New Zealand. They also claim to have 35 million users. They have inked various partner deals with yahoo, apple and skype. Don't count them out yet... but they better get some growth going to catch up to the leaders of the pack. Oh, and they have $15 in VC capital, which is a pittance compared to the deep pockets of newscorp, google and facebook.

Hi5 . Has been a huge hit almost everywhere in the world other than the USA. Their strategy of providing multiple languages and an easy to use platform has paid off in the form of 70 million users. As you can see by the graph, they have been climbing steadily alongside facebook for the last six months. The other networks don't have the language capability and are all mostly English only. Ok, myspace is venturing into new countries, but there has been low adoption rates for most of those ventures. They now have a beta API for developers and they will be a serious contender if they keep doing things right.

Orkut . Is a bland offering that is happily going along with about 30 million users. The stats say that traffic has dropped off in the last 2 months a bit but it doesn't really matter. They will be a contender. Why. Google owns them of course. They have piles of cash and have also announced that they will open up their social graph and access to their users via a ‘facebook like' platform. They have the cash to fight it out and once they start integrating the social graph into the rest of the google apps... they are going to have some SERIOUS functionality and the social graph. Orkut is the dark horse that will likely step up and run a great if not awesome long term race.

Facebook . The graph says it all. They are the fastest growing social network in town at the moment. Everyone has been reading about it, discussing it and joining up to get hooked up with old friends and new. This is not a fad, old and young alike are joing by the millions to see what this facebook thing is about. Some may say throwing sheep and turning your friends into zombies is stupid but that will wear thin after a while. Whatever the naysayers say, facebook's f8 developer platform is a runaway success and the other guys are racing to build one too and lure the builders of all the applications for their users to interact. As we know, there are deal talks going on with several very large companies going on right now. If one of these mega deals goes through, facebook will sell a small portion of the company and have a HUGE warchest of cash to keep the growth rolling. We like it so much for the long term, we started a whole website about it!

Yes, we know there are lots of sites that have been left out, leave your thoughts and suggestions in the comments and we may write about the other ones later!

Oreilly.com has posted an article about facebook applications and the long tail. They put together some research that is very interesting which states that 87% of all application usage in facebook is by 84 applications. There are about 5000 applications now on facebook so that is roughly 1.7% of the applications. He goes on to tell that only 45 applications have more than 100,000 active users.

Now these are great insights to the statistics of facebook application usage but then he goes on to explain how this is the long tail. Well actually this is incorrect as the long tail is supposed to be fat and deep and catering to a market that was unreachable before. He acknowledges the mistake in an update and says it should be called "the short head rules" . This more accurately describes the phenomenon.

What does this mean? Is it not worthwhile to develop applications for facebook because only the first entrant have all the traffic. No way! The facebook f8 platform is still in its infancy and there are going to be plenty of apps that breakthrough and get massive usage. Also, the growth rate of facebook should be taken into account. There are now 30 million users on facebook. What is going to happen when the user numbers hit 50 million? 100 million? Will the dynamics change then? We think there is plenty of opportunity for the apps in the long tail still.

Another factor is advertising. Many application developers have spent time on building their apps and trying to make them viral on their own. Some will succeed in this manor but a viral application PLUS advertising will always come out on top.
Don't get discouraged by this report if you are an application developer, facebook is still a baby and there is going to be more massive growth to come!

It is safe to say that the facebook f8 platform for 3rd party developers to launch applications on the facebook infrastructure, is a massive hit. Over 5000 applications have now been developed and more are flooding facebook everyday.

This has led to a call by developers and investors to be able to get more detailed stats on how their applications are doing. Facebook responded by introducing stats that tells you how many users are active on each application in any given day. This was a step in the right direction but left people wondering how many installs they had.

Facebook has moved quickly to rectify the problem and are now doing even better to improve the application statistics. Here is an overview of the changes from the facebook developers blog:

"Tonight we launched a stats page for applications in our effort to give you guys more information about how your apps are doing. Currently, the page displays some basic information about the number of adds, removes, blocks, and total users, as well as a summary of sampled HTTP requests for your app. You can check out the application stats by following the "More Stats" link underneath your application name on the right-hand column of this page. We’ll continue to add relevant and interesting data to the page as we can. In the meanwhile, if you have any suggestions for improvement or other stats that you'd like to see, please let us know on the wiki ."

In May, Toronto, Canada was the top city network on facebook by usage, but now it looks like the British and especially those in London are pulling away with the lead. Use of facebook in the UK has skyrocketed and is now the third biggest country (by usage) on facebook. How much are the Brits using facebook? In August, they contributed 5.5 Billion page impressions to the facebook stats. In London alone there were over one million using facebook! That is impressive and UK companies are sure to want to get advertising to this demographic.

In the next chart below you can see how usage in Canada, UK and Australia compares. Canada has the lead for now but with the UK having double Canada's population, it better enjoy the lead while it has the chance. Our prediction is that the UK will overtake the Canucks very soon.