Facebook Users = Country

0 CommentsWednesday • January 7, 2009 • by Cale Bruckner

How many users do you have? That’s a question you hear a lot in the Tech Industry. Most people are really skilled at creatively inflating the number because users = money, success, influence, and more. If you’re talking valuation in the Tech Industry it usually looks something like valuation = users * inflated user value.

Scanning my feed stream today I happened across a post by Mark Zuckerberg. If you don’t know who Mark is – well, just stop reading this and go back to work. Mark wins the award, IMO, for best answer to the "How many users do you have?" question.

"Today, we reached another milestone: 150 million people around the world are now actively using Facebook and almost half of them are using Facebook every day. This includes people in every continent—even Antarctica. If Facebook were a country, it would be the eighth most populated in the world, just ahead of Japan, Russia and Nigeria." — Mark

Here’s why I think Mark wins the award:

• He says "actively" and then backs it up with "almost half of them are using Facebook every day" – most people stretch the definition of "active" or don’t even bother using it
• He gives the number of users real meaning and context by creating a country for them which happens to be larger than Japan, and Russia
• and it helps to have 150 million users

Nicely done Mark. Hats off to Facebook – a service I seem to be using more and more as friends of all kinds jump on the bandwagon.