Saturday, July 07, 2007
Facebook grows by 89%
And the Facebook rage goes on.
The number Facebook users nearly doubled in the past year. In May, as many as 26 million Americans visited Facebook, up 89 % since May 2006. Facebook is particularly popular with people between 25 and 34 years old, for whom the increase was 181% (comScore). Meanwhile, visits from users aged 12 to 17 rose from 1.6 million to 4.1 million, up 149%.
With 38.8 million users, Facebook is still relatively small compared to MySpace’s 105 million (ComScore). However, Facebook is currently growing nearly 20 times faster than MySpace (Nielsen/Netratings). The momentum is clearly with Facebook, which has been the social network to be on. And I can understand why it is growing so fast. Virality is built deep inside the Facebook platform.
For one, they make it easy for members to invite friends to join their personal network. Instead of having to dig into their contacts’ email addresses one by one, Facebook allows joiners to automatically upload contacts from their email accounts (Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail) and send invites.
Then, once somebody joins, he usually stays. Facebook has managed to make its platform incredibly sticky. ComScore reports that the average Facebook user spends 3 hours and 6 minutes on the site monthly. The vast amount of “widgety” applications, such as iLike and X Me, certainly help increase the stickiness by creating a constant stream of innovation.
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