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16s·

Every time I see someone cite the Facebook user count, it goes up by 100 million. Why is that?

Edit: <Joke> At this rate, they'll have more users than there are people on Earth by the end of the year.</Joke>

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750M is the latest oficial user count as of FB-Skype integration

I am a Skype user and not a FB user and I have no intentions of ever using the FB product again (I deleted my account around 2 years ago). I wonder how many of those 750 are the same as I.

Facebook reports monthly active users - people who have visited the site in the last 30 days. You (and anyone else who hasn't visited in last 30 days) are not included in that number.

Refs:

http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/10/dear-tech-press-lets-cut-th...

http://www.insidefacebook.com/2011/07/06/facebook-750-millio...

Given that some people have separate accounts for games, I wonder how accurately that number reflects the actual number of users.

There's also accounts for people's cats, cars, bands, and loads of other silliness. So we can discount that claimed 750m some, but probably in the ballpark of not much more than 10%. And OTOH, perhaps Facebook knows this and already considers account-to-person dilution in figuring its revenue expectations.

Also, 250 million of the 750 million actives are mobile users, and those are much more unlikely to be fake. ref: https://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics

I still find some pets and companies using profiles, but most of these are pages these days (since there really aren't advantages to making a profile vs. a page for them), and there is a process for converting these to pages - https://www.facebook.com/help/?page=18918 - and it is the way to reactivate a non-human account that is reported.

None, Facebook user counts are people who actively use the service.

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