The Facebook Phenomenon - Facebook Statistics and Concluding Thoughts

Overall Statistics

Percent of global Internet users who visit Facebook (November, 2007):

Number of active users: 49,000,000 (forty-nine million).

Monthly new average users: 4,000,000 (four million).

Daily new user average: 200,000.

Monthly page views: over 15 billion.

Monthly count of searches: over 500 million.

Search index size: 200GB.

Total number of photos hosted: 1.7 billion (circa 44 photos / user).

(Facebook's traffic history graph over a period of one year- Source: Alexa.)

Concluding Thoughts

Lee Lorenzen is the CEO of the first Facebook-only VC Fund, Altura Ventures.  Some of his claims are really provocative and interesting regarding the future of Facebook. Let's check them out:

1. Facebook's active users count will grow to 200 million by Dec. 2008.

2. Facebook will go public in 18 months with an IPO and a valuation of $100 billion.

According to Lorenzen the $15 billion valuation isn't at all exaggerated. He is a true believer in the future of Facebook, and he backed up the aforementioned claims here. This would be possible due to search engine monetization and the idea of opening a shopping mall dedicated just to Facebook users. E-commerce indeed sounds promising.

He also predicts "having revenue of $2+ billion in 2008 and $4+ billion in 2009." Anyway, one thing is pretty clear: Facebook does have a really interesting future. The expectations are sky-high, knowing that right now it barely brings in annual revenue (estimated $150 million); the experts say that their user base and platform is priceless.

But time certainly will tell. Yet again we have two decisions: we either patiently wait to see what happens or we contribute and get involved in something. I for one am curious how OpenSocial combined with decentralization solutions (OAuth + OpenID) can challenge Facebook's dominance. And what about the impact of MySpace Platform?

All of these being said it's time for me to end this article. My personal conclusion on the whole Facebook phenomenon: it is a truly fantastic way to reach a specific demographic target, such as Internet-savvy youngsters (18-25), but they must realize that with their popularity comes great responsibility.

Facebook right now is clean and neat, with organized content and virtually spam-free, but if you glance over at MySpace, their primary competition, you will see mostly bloated and extremely disorganized content, struggling pages thanks to poorly designed codes and a surplus of extras; it's also a so-called heaven of spam-lovers. Facebook needs to maintain its reputation otherwise advertisers will vanish altogether, along with $$$ gazillion "valuation offers."