Facebook Has 1 Billion Users, Mark Zuckerberg Announces In A Status Update

You Know What's Cool? 1 Billion Users

Facebook officially now has over 1 billion active monthly users, a new milestone for the world's largest social network.

The update to the size of Facebook, founded only in 2004 from a college dorm room, was announced by founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a statuts update on the morning of October 4.

This morning, there are more than one billion people using Facebook actively each month.

If you're reading this: thank you for giving me and my little team the honor of serving you.

Helping a billion people connect is amazing, humbling and by far the thing I am most proud of in my life.

I am committed to working every day to make Facebook better for you, and hopefully together one day we will be able to connect the rest of the world too.

Facebook hit the long-sought, 10-digit user mark at precisely 12.45 p.m. PT on September 14. Approximately 1 in 7 people on Earth is on Facebook, given the U.S. Census Bureau's world population estimate of 7.04 billion.

Who's the lucky one-billionth user? Not even Zuckerberg's sure if Facebook knows. In an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek's Brad Stone and Ashlee Vance, the Facebook co-founder admits that the claim to 1 billion users is based on an estimate, not a true count.

"Doing data analytics at this scale is a big challenge, and one of the things you have to do is sample," Zuckerberg told Stone and Vance. "So it’s funny, we were all sitting around watching us get to a billion users but it was actually just a sample of the users. It’s like you’re not going to try to pull a billion rows from a database, so you’ll pull a sample and project out."

Along with active monthly users, Facebook made several other metrics public in a Word document (download here) published along with Zuckerberg's post.

A majority of Facebook users -- 600 million -- are using mobile phones to log on to the social network, Facebook reports. Since becoming a publicly traded company in May, investors have doubted the company's ability to sell ads on mobile phones as its users increasingly check status updates and upload photos from phones instead of desktops or laptops. Since initially selling for $38 in May, Facebook's stock price has plummeted to $21.83 as of October 3.

The median age of members just joining Facebook, originally founded as a social network exclusively for college students, continues to fall. During the week Facebook hit 1 billion users, the median age of a new member was 22, down from 23 when Facebook hit 500 million users in 2010 and 26 when it hit 100 million users in 2008.

Facebook's servers are currently storing 219 billion photos from users. With 265 billion uploaded at one time or another, about 17 percent of all photos ever put on Facebook have been deleted. (That's a lot of embarrassing drunken nights.)

Some other statistics announced by Facebook:

  • 140.3 billion friend connections since 2004.
  • Over 1.13 trillion "Likes" since the button was added in 2009.
  • 62.6 million songs have been played 22 billion times. According to Facebook, that's 210,000 years of listening.

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