Facebook user growth rate was estimated at *** percent in 2020. This was the highest growth measured over the evaluated period. With the coronavirus outbreak at the first half of 2020, internet users resorted to social media to stay connected. Facebook was created in 2004 by Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg and has seen unprecedented popularity becoming a leader among social networks.

With roughly three billion monthly active users as of the second quarter of 2023, Facebook is the most used online social network worldwide. The platform surpassed two billion active users in the second quarter of 2017, taking just over 13 years to reach this milestone. In comparison, Meta-owned Instagram took 11.2 years, and Google’s YouTube took just over 14 years to achieve this landmark. As of January 2022, Facebook’s leading audience base was in India, with almost 330 million users whilst the United States ranked second with an approximate total of 179 million users. The platform also finds remarkable popularity in Indonesia and Brazil. Social Media usage in the United States In January 2021, Facebook was the platform on which users in the United States spent the most time per day. The average time spent on Facebook was 33 minutes, followed by TikTok with 32 minutes and Twitter with 31 daily minutes. Due to the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020, all major social media platforms saw an increase in daily usage, which then either plateaued or decreased in 2021. At the end of 2021, over a quarter of all Facebook users in the United States belonged to the 25 to 34 year age group and 18.2 percent of users were in the 35 to 44 year age group. In general, Facebook users were more likely to be female. Meta Platforms Meta is Facebook’s recently renamed parent company and had a grand total of 3.59 billion core product users by the final quarter of 2021. Other Meta products include Instagram, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Oculus – Meta’s virtual reality subsidiary which produces VR headsets. In 2021, Meta's revenue amounted to 117 billion US dollars, up from around 86 billion U.S. dollars in the previous financial year.

Facebook probably needs no introduction; nonetheless, here is a quick history of the company. The world’s biggest and most-famous social network was launched by Mark Zuckerberg while he was a...

The number of Facebook users in the United States was forecast to continuously increase between 2024 and 2028 by in total **** million users (+**** percent). After the ninth consecutive increasing year, the Facebook user base is estimated to reach ***** million users and therefore a new peak in 2028. Notably, the number of Facebook users of was continuously increasing over the past years.User figures, shown here regarding the platform facebook, have been estimated by taking into account company filings or press material, secondary research, app downloads and traffic data. They refer to the average monthly active users over the period and count multiple accounts by persons only once.The shown data are an excerpt of Statista's Key Market Indicators (KMI). The KMI are a collection of primary and secondary indicators on the macro-economic, demographic and technological environment in up to *** countries and regions worldwide. All indicators are sourced from international and national statistical offices, trade associations and the trade press and they are processed to generate comparable data sets (see supplementary notes under details for more information).

In 2023, there were *** million Facebook users in Ireland. By 2029, it is estimated there will be around *** million users in the country. Overall, there are *** million social media users in Ireland as of 2024. Facebook users in Ireland Females aged 25 to 34 years make up the largest demographic of Irish Facebook users. **** percent of users fall under that category. Just **** percent of Facebook’s user base in the Republic of Ireland is under the age of **, while **** percent of the user base is between the ages of ** to **. Facebook’s slowing growth across Europe While the general number of daily active users (DAU) in Europe continues to increase, Facebook’s growth in Europe slowed considerably compared to previous years. There was no growth at all from the first quarter of 2019 to the second quarter of 2019, and the company actually lost **** million DAU during the first three quarters of 2018. The Cambridge Analytica scandal broke in March 2018, shortly before the company lost ***** million DAU.

According to a global survey conducted in February 2024, almost 40 percent of Facebook users paid attention to news from mainstram news outlets and mainstream journalists on the social network. Additionally, 39 percent reported paying attention to personalities, such as celebrities and influencers. Around one in four Facebook users paid attention to politicians and politican activists on the network.

1) Data Introduction • The Facebook Data is a social network analysis data that can be used to identify key user groups that can contribute to business growth and develop recommendation strategies, including Facebook users' activity patterns, interactions, likes, friendships, gender, and age.

2) Data Utilization (1) Facebook Data has characteristics that: • This dataset consists of numerical and categorical variables such as user ID, gender, age, number of friends, number of likes (mobile/web), number of friend requests, number of likes received/sent, and frequency of activities, allowing you to analyze user-specific behavioral characteristics and interaction patterns from multiple angles. (2) Facebook Data can be used to: • Core User Group Targeting and Recommendation Strategies: Use key characteristics such as gender, age, frequency of activity, friends and likes to identify user groups that have a significant impact on business growth and to develop customized content and advertising recommendation strategies. • Analysis of Usage Behavior and Platform Trends: Mobile and Web-based Good By analyzing data such as distribution, age and gender activity patterns, and friend relationship formation, you can visually explore changes in user usage behavior and major trends within the platform.

During the fourth quarter of 2023, the number of daily active users on Facebook reached 2.1 billion, a minor increase on the previous quarter. When compared with the number of daily active users in the final quarter of 2022, the platform has gained around 100 million users. Facebook’s penetration rate for the United States in 2023 was 72.13 percent, up from 71.43 percent in 2022. The social network’s audience reach is projected to stand at 75.79 percent by 2027.

Most popular social media websites

As of May 2021, Facebook was the most used social media site in the United States, accounting for 71.8 percent of all social media visits. Ranking in second place was Pinterest with 12.4 percent, followed by Twitter and Instagram, with 9.15 percent and 3.82 percent, respectively. Although other sites remain popular, Facebook’s number of visits made it undoubtably the leading social media platform in terms of social media site visits.

For Generation Z and Millennials in the United States, Facebook was one of the least popular platforms used to connect with others. Gen Z and Millennials preferred video sharing platforms, specifically Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube.

Meta’s revenue

Facebook Inc was renamed as Meta in 2021, in a strategic step toward the metaverse. Meta Platforms is now the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp amongst others, together being known as Meta’s Family of Apps.

Meta’s annual revenue for 2021 was 117.92 billion U.S. dollars, up from 85.97 billion in 2020. Within a decade, the company has increased its annual revenue by approximately 114 billion U.S. dollars. In the most recent fiscal year, Meta’s Family of Apps were responsible for over 115 billion U.S. dollars’ worth of Meta’s revenue.

Facebook is fast approaching 3 billion monthly active users. That’s about 36% of the world’s entire population that log in and use Facebook at least once a month.

This statistic represents the growth rate of Facebook users in India from 2016 to 2021. The projected growth rate of Facebook users in India in 2021 was forecasted to be around 9.9 percent, down from around 11.4 percent in 2020.

This statistic presents the fastest-growing brands on Facebook as of March 2021, as measured in growth in social media fans. During the survey period it was found that Jayprehistoricpets was the fastest-growing brand on the social network, gaining over **** million followers within the last month.

As of January 2025, 24.2 percent of Facebook users in the United States were aged between 25 and 34 years, making up Facebook’s largest audience in the country. Overall, 19 percent of users belonged to the 18 to 24-year age group. Does everyone in the U.S. use Facebook? In 2023, there were approximately 247 million Facebook users in the U.S., a figure which is projected to steadily increase, and reach 262.8 million by 2028. Social media users in the United States have a very high awareness of the social media giant. Expectedly, 94 percent of users had heard of the brand in 2023. Although the vast majority of U.S. social networkers knew of Facebook, the likeability of the platform was not so impressive at 68 percent. Nonetheless, usage, loyalty, and buzz around the brand remained relatively high. Facebook, Meta, and the metaverse A strategic rebranding from Facebook to Meta Platforms in late 2021 boded well for the company in Mark Zuckerberg’s attempt to be strongly linked to the metaverse, and to be considered more than just a social media company. According to a survey conducted in the U.S. in early 2022, Meta Platforms is the brand that Americans most associated with the metaverse.  

The average Facebook user spends about 19.6 per month on Facebook every month. This works out to be about 39 minutes per day.

This fileset contains a series of screenshots taken from our facebook advertising account. A few days ago we noticed that some negative "SEO" tactics, for lack of a better term, were having a negative impact on the performance of ads and fan engagement on the facebook page that we've been building.

I developed a custom software package, which utilizes nueural networks I've developed, to identify a target demographic, and suggest advertising content for said target demographic.

After a short training period we were able to create advertisemsents on facebook that averaged a cost of 0.01 cents per like. We also had a fan page engagement of nearly 4 times that of major brands like Wal-Mart.

Shortly after we began to obtain success we started noticing problems with our page. Since we have a stalker issue, we determined that the issues with our page were likely related to him.

We assued this because we had a disproportinately high number of spammy, negative, and inapporpriate comments on our posts. Offline harassment of our staff by the stalker also increased significantly during this time.

Curiously, we believe that the incident with the stalker allowed us to ascertain some interesting observations about Facebook's algorithims, which I've outlined below.

We believe, after reseraching this issue, that Facebook's algorithims suffer from the following issues:

1. They are easily gamed. We think that Facebook's algorithims are hypersensitive to negative comments being made on a post, and conversely likely positive ones as well. If a post is hidden, the comments are negative, or if a user interacts with the post negatively in some way, then Facebook's algorithims will "punish" your page.

2. We think that a series of scripted fake bot accounts would easily cause the issues that we've been expriencing.

As you can see from the data provided, over 90% of our likes come from paid facebook advertisement, therefore we do not have a significant number of fake accounts on our page brought in by third party advertising because we didn't do any of that.

Moreover, we did not send any of our fans obtained via mailing lists, or offline contact to our facebook page, those fans participate with us via email and/or through our private Google+ community.

So it is safe to say that our problems have not been caused by purchasing a large amount of fake likes from any third party vendor.

In addition, because our likes were gained very quickly, at a rate of about 2.5k likes a day, we do not believe that we have suffered from changes in the general demographic of our Facebook fan base over time.

Yet almost immediately after we started expericing trolling issues with our page, we also noticed a dip in the number of fans our posts were shown to by Facebook, and the performance of our ads began to go down, even though the content on our page had not changed.

We attributed this to holes in Facebook's algorithims, and potentially to the excessive use of fake bot accounts by Facebook itself.

We cannot prove the latter satement, but there have been similar reports before. Reference - http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidthier/2012/08/01/facebook-investigating-claims-that-80-of-ad-clicks-come-from-bots/

This article from Forbes outlines how one startup company repoted that up to 80% of their Facebook likes were fake bot accounts even though they paid for advertising directly through Facebook.

Our reserach suggests that Facebook's advertising platform functions as follows: - An advertiser pays for likes with Facebook, and the quality of the content on their page is initially assessed by those who are liking the page, but once the page obtains a following, we believe that the quality of the content is assessed by how many people like the posts on the page directly after they are posted.

If a post gets hidden, marked as spammed, skipped over, whatever, then we beleive that Facebook kicks that post out of the newsfeeds. If this happens to a significant number of posts on the page, then we believe that Facebook places the page on an advertising black-list.

Once on this black-list ads will begin to perform poorly, and content will drop out of newsfeeds causing even the most active page to go silent.

We tested this by posting pictures of attractive blond women, which with our demographic would have normally obtained a large number of likes and we struggled to get even 10 likes at over 20k page likes when we would have previosuly obtained almost 100 likes without boosting at only 5k page likes.

Why this probably isn't seen more often: In most cases this probably takes a while to occur as pages become old and fans grow bored, but in our case, because we have a stalker trolling our page with what appears to be hundres of scripted bot accounts, the effect was seen immediately.

Our data suggests that it became a tug of war between our stalker's army of fake bot accounts (making spammy comments, hiding our posts from newsfeeds, etc) and the real fans that actually like our page (who were voting our conent up - i.e. liking it, etc).

If you look at the graph of page likes in the figures provided - you can see that the darker purple are the fans we obtained via facebook advertising, well over 90%. We believe that the light purple (the "organic" fans) is mostly comprised of our stalker's fake drone accounts. We have less than 20 family members and friends liking our page, when we began this experiment we asked them not to interact with our page or the content.

In conclusion: We still have a lot more work to do, but it is highly likely that many Facebook likes are either scripted bots, and/or that Facebook's "weighting" algorithims are very suceptible to gaming via negative "SEO" tactics. Conversely, they are likely sensitive to gaming via positive "SEO" tactics as well.

Of course we cannot say for certain where the Facebook accounts that like a page come from without acess to their internal systems, but the evidence does strongly suggest that Facebook might be plagued with a large quantity of bot accounts, and that their algorithim has to be sensitive to actions from live users, so that the quality of the content can be easily ascertained. Otherwise it would be pretty easy for an advertiser to game Facebook's system by paying for, and getting, a large quantity of likes for content that is not appealing to any significant group of people.

Again we have to reiterate that we have no solid proof of this, but our data strongly suggests that this is the case.

We have reported the issues to Facebook, but interestingly, after we made it clear that we were going to analyze and investigate the issues with our page, we have been suddenly and incessently plagued with a never ending stream of "technical difficulties" related to our advertising account.

If you'd like to collaborate on this project, please feel free to email me at Jamie@ITSmoleculardesign.com.

In the fourth quarter of 2023, Meta's Facebook had 408 million monthly active users (MAUs) in Europe. During the same quarter of 2022, the platform amassed around 407 million MAUs in Europe.

Monthly active users worldwide

In the fourth quarter of 2008 Facebook provided a service for just 100 million active users. Thirteen years on, as of the second quarter of 2021 that number had risen to an astounding 2.89 billion MAUs. The number of MAUs has never taken a backward step during the examined period.

 Growth outside of Europe and North America 

Facebook continues to focus on regions outside of Europe and North America, and the reward of this effort can be seen in areas such as the Asia Pacific region, where the company has seen significant gains in terms of growing the active user base. Facebook reached over 788 million daily active users (DAU) in the second quarter of 2021.

56.5% of Facebook users worldwide are male. This is in direct contrast to only 43.5% of Facebook being female.

Among the countries/territories presented in the dataset, Facebook’s highest advertising cost-per-mille (CPM) was in the United States, valued at 35 U.S. dollars in the third quarter of 2021. For comparison, the lowest CPM, one U.S. dollar, was recorded in Pakistan.
What are other Facebook advertising costs and metrics?
Cost-per-click (CPC) is another popular metric when it comes to advertising on the social platform. Globally, the average CPC on Facebook stood at 63 cents at the end of 2018 . Certain studies reveal that CPCs vary depending on the marketing campaign objective. This means that campaigns aiming at app installs, lead generation and product catalog sales are the most expensive, whereas campaigns targeting post engagement, messages and video views are on the opposite side of the spectrum. How does Facebook compare with other social media among marketers?
The majority of marketers indicate that Facebook is the most important social platform for their business, with a staggering 40 percent lead over LinkedIn and even Facebook’s own platform - Instagram. However, with recent data breaches Facebook has seen some decrease in growth. Its position is still strong enough that marketers increase their spending on the social network. However, Instagram seems to be overtaking the older brother, and more industry professionals are planning to increase investments in the photo sharing platform than in Facebook.

36.8% of the entire world’s population uses Facebook at least once per month.

The number of Facebook users in Belgium was forecast to increase between 2024 and 2028 by in total **** million users (+**** percent). This overall increase does not happen continuously, notably not in 2026. The Facebook user base is estimated to amount to **** million users in 2028. User figures, shown here regarding the platform facebook, have been estimated by taking into account company filings or press material, secondary research, app downloads and traffic data. They refer to the average monthly active users over the period and count multiple accounts by persons only once.The shown data are an excerpt of Statista's Key Market Indicators (KMI). The KMI are a collection of primary and secondary indicators on the macro-economic, demographic and technological environment in up to *** countries and regions worldwide. All indicators are sourced from international and national statistical offices, trade associations and the trade press and they are processed to generate comparable data sets (see supplementary notes under details for more information).

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"The ultimate takedown." New York Times Book Review

Award-winning New York Times reporters Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang unveil the tech story of our times in a riveting, behind-the-scenes expose that offers the definitive account of Facebook's fall from grace.

Once one of Silicon Valley's greatest success stories, Facebook has been under constant fire for the past five years, roiled by controversies and crises. It turns out that while the tech giant was connecting the world, they were also mishandling users' data, spreading fake news, and amplifying dangerous, polarizing hate speech.

The company, many said, had simply lost its way. But the truth is far more complex. Leadership decisions enabled, and then attempted to deflect attention from, the crises. Time after time, Facebook's engineers were instructed to create tools that encouraged people to spend as much time on the platform as possible, even as those same tools boosted inflammatory rhetoric, conspiracy theories, and partisan filter bubbles. And while consumers and lawmakers focused their outrage on privacy breaches and misinformation, Facebook solidified its role as the world's most voracious data-mining machine, posting record profits, and shoring up its dominance via aggressive lobbying efforts.

Drawing on their unrivaled sources, Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang take readers inside the complex court politics, alliances and rivalries within the company to shine a light on the fatal cracks in the architecture of the tech behemoth. Their explosive, exclusive reporting led them to a shocking conclusion: The missteps of the last five years were not an anomaly but an inevitability this is how Facebook was built to perform. In a period of great upheaval, growth has remained the one constant under the leadership of Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg. Both have been held up as archetypes of uniquely 21^st century executives he the tech boy genius turned billionaire, she the ultimate woman in business, an inspiration to millions through her books and speeches. But sealed off in tight circles of advisers and hobbled by their own ambition and hubris, each has stood by as their technology is coopted by hate-mongers, criminals and corrupt political regimes across the globe, with devastating consequences. In An Ugly Truth, they are at last held accountable.

ISBN: 9780062960696 Published: July 21st, 2021 By: Sheera Frankel, Cecilia Kang Read by: Holter Graham

©2021 Frankel, Kang (P)2021 HarperAudio