Facebook reaches 200 million users
Facebook has attracted over 200 million users worldwide, growing by 50 million in 2009 alone, and doubling the 
number of unique monthly visitors achieved by its main rival, MySpace.
The figures were confirmed yesterday, by Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of the social networking site, in his blog post titled, ‘200 million strong.’
Zuckerberg went on to say that Facebook is attracting a large number of users, despite recent issues with the new website design and user privacy.
Facebook announced that in January the website had attracted 150 million users, which grew to 175 million by the end of February. Figures for 2009, reveal that more that 500,000 people sign up to the site every day.
Further data showed that one in four people who have access to the internet logged into Facebook throughout February.
This time last year, Facebook and MySpace levelled out in terms of users. Since then, MySpace has seen a 2 per cent fall, with a minimal growth through March.
Questions still remain, despite Facebook’s successes, over its ability to tap into a sustainable revenue stream-as the number users continues to grow, so do operational costs.
A recent financial report found that Facebook expected a 70 per cent growth in 2009, making the company profitable by 2010.
Facebook gains its revenue through display advertising, and welcomes market researchers to use its database for collecting demographical statistics.
Last month Facebook changed its homepage to resemble rival site, Twitter, with a stream of regularly updated friend information, causing an uproar from users.
Despite the issues, the layout remains in place, which Facebooks Chief Operational Officer, Sheryl Sandberg, believes will be of a great advantage to advertisers.
Sandberg said that on Facebook, the average person has around 120 friends, which can be split up into three groups, reciprocal, direct and active.
Reciprocal generally only count for five of a persons 120 friends, in which they engage in day to day conversation.
Direct communications account for one way conversations that don’t generally get a response, which generally counts for about nine of a person’s online friends.
The last group of active communicators represent a potential advertising opportunity for businesses. The new layout is designed so that users gain a constant stream of information about their online friends which can be incorporated with advertisements, allowing targeted ads to be screened by users.
Although it only has 7 million members, Twitter looks to be the next competitor for Facebook, gaining a lot of attention in the media over recent months.
Popularity: 1% [?]
