Facebook Climbs Toward 700 Million Users Worldwide, With Steady Growth in the US
Discrepancies among third party measurement services partially obscure what still looks like a steady growth rate for Facebook in the US and around the world. — According to the data we track …
Context & Ripple Effects
Four months after NetworkEffect asked whether Facebook had even reached 600 million users, Inside Facebook's tracking puts the company approaching 700 million worldwide — roughly a hundred million added since that December tally, with US growth described as steady rather than explosive. The catch, which the article itself flags, is that third-party measurement services disagree enough to partially obscure the true rate, so the headline number rests partly on Facebook-adjacent panel data.
The milestone lands in a busy stretch for the company: within the same month Facebook launched the facebook-studio.com community for ad agency creatives, open-sourced its server and data center designs, shipped event check-ins and maps on iPhone, and saw a rumored Baidu partnership for entering China — a claim an unnamed source said involved no signed agreement with any Chinese company. Scale is the substrate all four of those moves depend on.
First-order effects
- Facebook's pitch to advertisers and the agencies it just built facebook-studio.com for gets stronger: a near-700-million-user audience with still-growing US reach is the inventory argument behind its brand-page push.
- Ad buyers relying on third-party trackers face conflicting Facebook numbers at exactly the moment they set budgets against them, making the measurement discrepancy itself a live commercial problem rather than a statistical footnote.
Second-order effects
- Measurement services now compete over whose Facebook estimate becomes the reference figure, since whichever number the market accepts effectively prices the audience — the tracker with the credible count gains leverage over both Facebook and media planners.
- Sustained user growth forces continued infrastructure spending, which is the backdrop for Facebook's decision to open-source its server and data-center designs — recruiting industry help to keep scaling costs down instead of bearing them alone.
Third-order effects
- If the pace implied by the corpus holds — from the December 2010 600-million question to near-700 million by April 2011 — the next few hundred million users will come disproportionately from markets Facebook has not entered, with China the obvious prize and the denied Baidu rumor showing how much speculation one unconfirmed partnership attracts.
- As platform-reported scale outpaces independent verification, audience measurement migrates toward the platforms themselves, shifting pricing power in online advertising toward whoever owns the user count.
The trend: Social networking is consolidating into a single dominant audience aggregator whose self-reported scale increasingly outruns the third-party measurement industry built to verify it.