Facebook’s Monthly User Growth: 7 million!

About a month ago I posted the article Facebook Frenzy, giving a roundup of Facebook buzz, thoughts about the TripAdvisor’s application “Cities I’ve Visited” and the publication of demographic data of Facebook users in 31 countries, taken from Facebook Flyers Pro on October 22nd. So what happened since then?

First a brief overview of announcements: On October 24, 2007 Microsoft announced that it had invested $240 million (1.6% stake) in Facebook at a valuation of $15 billion, beating out Google Inc. On November 1, 2007 Google launched OpenSocial, with a huge number of social network partners, including heavy-weight MySpace. And on November 6, 2007 Facebook revealed their new ad system “Facebook ads” and said 12 major brands (including Coca Cola, Verizon) had already committed to using Facebook Ads.

So what about user growth? Update or Die from Brazil posted on October 23, 2007 statistics of the Top 3 social networks. In third place Facebook with 48 million users (source: Facebook statistics), Google’s Orkut ranked second with 67 million users (source: Wikipedia) and far ahead of the competition MySpace with 110 million users (source: BBC). Three days later on October 26, 2007 Six pixels of Separation noted that Mike Murphy (Facebook Vice-President Media Sales) announced in his presentation that Facebook had surpassed fifty million worldwide community members! Other mindblowing statistics by Mike Murphy: The average Facebook user spends about 21 minutes per day on the social network, Facebook’s size doubles every six months and Facebook is adding about 350 thousand new users every day. When looking at the Facebook statistics today, “general growth’ has risen to 55 million active users! So Mark Zuckerberg’s social network added 7 million users to its user base in just one month?

Looking at recent postings of a number of influential blogs, one must conclude that they are all writing about the fast growing Facebook numbers. On November 9, 2007 Emergence Media published a table showing Sweden had surpassed the 1 million mark. On November 12, 2007 Facebook Observer posted Israel’s Facebook members have risen by 100% during the last month. The same day Mashable.fr posted Facebook user growth in France: 12.000 members/day! This phenomenal growth has also attracted interest from several TV programs in France, like Canal+, France 2 and M6.

So did Facebook actually add 7 million users in just one month? Let’s compare the “Flyers Pro” statistics of last month with the latest “Facebook Ads” stats to find out. Below the overview. Note: To verify if our numbers are correct you can see another source with last month’s Facebook numbers.

Looking at the “Facebook Ads” stats, the 3rd social network in the world is hitting the rest of the world at an astonishing rate and even greater than 7 million! Turkey, Israel, Malaysia, France, China and Singapore are Facebook’s rising stars. Last month Facebook added about 7.5 million users to its userbase in 31 countries. Dazzling figures!

(source: Facebook Flyers Pro; October 22nd, 2007 & Facebook Ads; November 21st, 2007)

If you’re interested in more Facebook statistics, check out these Comscore charts, Hitwise stats and Flickr photos of Facebook growth figures in February 2007.