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Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

MAU is still increasing at ~2.7B. World Population without China ( Where Facebook can not be used ) is 6B. That is nearly half of the world on Facebook.

I know people on HN hate Facebook. But it is truly quite amazing looking at those numbers.

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I think that’s a bit unfair. People from many walks of life, with emphasis on a tremendously broad variety of disciplines also hate Facebook.

A large (very very large) percentage of people are from India.

Think of India's internet as America's internet from 2014. Everybody loves facebook here, there are 0 privacy laws.

Yes and many other countries in SEA, where Facebook = Internet. And Facebook also help many small medium businesses to find their target customers. Compared to older larger enterprise which are slow to react to Internet. These SME are thriving in the new Internet era. And overall a great contribution to the economy.

I wonder what percentage of the online population (excluding China).

75%? 80%?

If we assume vast majority of Internet users are Smartphone users. There are total of 4.5B Smartphone users, China has close to 1B. That is 2.7B out of 3.5B.

So Yes, roughly 77%.

And with IG and WA they make 3.2B out of 3.5B, ~93%

Surely there’s overlap between the users? Or was that factored in already.

Already Factored in. In other words, 90%+ of Smartphone users outside China has at least one of the Facebook App installed.

And growing.

Do we have accurate estimates for how many of them are real and unique people?

How many are real people?

If you count WhatsApp and Instagram, that number is not surprising at all.

That's just FB, if you include WhatsApp and Insta, that number is 3.2B

Wait, they count one person using WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook as 3 users? Even when you log in with the same account?

No, I believe they are saying if you use any one of those three services in a month you are part of the unique MAU.

If China ever bans FB in Hong Kong, will that be the single largest drop in users in a single day for FB?

There are only 8M people in HK, so I doubt it. Turkey has banned FB a few times, and they have 82M people.

MAU is still increasing at ~2.7B

Does Facebook specify what a "user" is?

Is just it someone with a Facebook/IG/WhatsApp/etc account who logs in?

Does it include someone with no Facebook account who clicks on a link to a page on Facebook?

Does it include someone who visits another web site that has a Facebook tracker on it?

From the link in the post Facebook has two different metrics: MAU (month average users) and MAP (monthly average people). They don't define these terms but MAU sounds like someone with a Facebook/IG/WhatsApp/etc account who logs in, which that 2.74B figure applies to.

The terms are defined somewhere in their reports (maybe only the annual ones).

My understanding was that you are counted as an MAP if you log into FB on any device, or use fb-login for at least one service in that month (although they may have changed it).

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