Facebook is a web traffic powerhouse: in March 2024 approximately 16.6 billion visits were measured to the Facebook.com, making it one of the most-visited websites online. In the third quarter of 2023, Facebook had nearly three billion monthly active users.

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.

In this blog are the latest Facebook advertising statistics that show how effective Facebook ads are now and what’s likely to happen in the future.

As of March 2024, Youtube.com accounted for nearly 43 of social media referral traffic to Facebook.com. Facebook's second, third and fourth-largest social media traffic driver were messenger.com, web.whatsapp.com, and instagram.com, each generating over 12 percent of social media traffic to the social network. Overall, social media accounted for 1.95 percent of traffic referrals to Facebook.com.

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

Traffic analytics, rankings, and competitive metrics for facebook.com as of May 2025

The number of Facebook users in the United States was forecast to continuously increase between 2024 and 2028 by in total 12.6 million users (+5.04 percent). After the ninth consecutive increasing year, the Facebook user base is estimated to reach 262.8 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 150 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).

The global number of Facebook users was forecast to continuously increase between 2023 and 2027 by in total 391 million users (+14.36 percent). After the fourth consecutive increasing year, the Facebook user base is estimated to reach 3.1 billion users and therefore a new peak in 2027. Notably, the number of Facebook users 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 150 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).

The number of Facebook users in Belgium was forecast to increase between 2024 and 2028 by in total 0.04 million users (+0.51 percent). This overall increase does not happen continuously, notably not in 2026. The Facebook user base is estimated to amount to 7.87 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 150 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).

The number of Facebook users in Hungary was forecast to continuously increase between 2024 and 2028 by in total 0.3 million users (+4.65 percent). After the fourth consecutive increasing year, the Facebook user base is estimated to reach 6.71 million users and therefore a new peak 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 150 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 the six months ending March 2024, the United States accounted for 22.7 percent of traffic to the social network Facebook.com. Second-ranked Vietnam accounted for over five percent of traffic to the website.

This dataset contains detailed Facebook advertising data for the political party Sumar and its leader Yolanda Díaz for the period from 9 January to 21 July 2023. This timeframe includes the campaign and pre-campaign periods of the 2023 Spanish general election. The dataset provides a comprehensive overview of the party's advertising strategies on Facebook, including unique ad IDs from Facebook's ad library, average cost per ad, dates, ad text, links, ad categories and estimated reach segmented by age, gender and geography. The dataset also includes information on the languages used in the ads, providing insights into the party's targeting and communication approaches during this crucial election period.

UPDATED 08/12/2013: The editor of Indie Review Magazine, spoke with Facebook on 08/12/2013, and it was confirmed that the technical difficulities with the advertising account have been resolved.

They will be assisting in an investigation to handle the troll problem with the magazne's page, and the other difficulties the page has been experiencing as a direct result of the stalker's harassment.

Attached you will find screenshots of various ads that we've released on Facebook.

The conclusion: The software predicted a performance for all of the ads pictured of 0.01 - 0.03. Prior to having major issues with negative "SEO" tactics on our facebook page the software's predictions for advertising perforamnce was extremely accurate.

After we began experiencing the troll problem, the advertisements began to perform in a very unpredicatble, sporadic, and oftentimes schizophrenic fashion.

The same ad, with the swimsuit model, showed a sustained performance of 0.08 earlier in the day, and later in the evening, after a series of technial difficulties on Facebook's end (with our page) the perforamance of the ad shot down to 0.19.

We took video of the ads from the moment they began to run until we paused them after the money started to deplete at an alarming rate, and what we found was shocking.

In the first 30 minutes our page was growing at a rate of around 3 likes a second (which is what is expected for the predicted growth rate of the ad - 0.01 to 0.03). This rate of growth had been sustained for days in the past with a very similar ad.

Then suddenly the ad performance plunged to dismal numbers that do not accurately reflect the rate at which our likes were initially gained. Not on the specific day in question nor in the past (with the same or similar ad and page content).

At this time, we have paused all of our facebook ads and plan to thoroughly analyze this data.

As stated in a previous article, which is linked below, we cannot comment directly on the internal workings of Facebook's advertising platform as we do not have access to that system - but our data highly suggests that if someone is using bot accounts they can significantly impact page performance.

We have been relying heavily on our custom software pagacke to anaylze the sitaution, and with the help of my neural networks we were able to identify patterns which revealed problem areas and allowed us to adjust our advertising strategy so that our page would be less suspectible to negative SEO tactics.

UPDATE: 08/10/2013 Facebook will be speaking with the editor of Indie Review Magazine, they indicated that there were experiencing technical difficulties. These technical difficulties have been impacting our page for days, thus we've halted our experimentation and will update with another figshare article, once more information has been obtained.

Reference: 1. http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidthier/2012/08/01/facebook-investigating-claims-that-80-of-ad-clicks-come-from-bots/ 2. Previous figshare article: http://figshare.com/articles/Potential_Issues_with_FB_Advertising_Algorithms_/767331

Using the CrowdTangle API, each of the pink slime news domains was input and searched for public Facebook Page and Group posts from 2019-2024. Since the maximum number of posts possible to return is 1,000, I created a recursive function to halve the timeframe until fewer than 1,000 posts were available and then add in the posts from all the remaining time frames. Each row is a different post from a public Facebook Page or Group linking to a known pink slime website.Ads were collected via facebook.com/ads/library using the United States location and “Issues, elections or politics” ad category. Each of the ad purchasers listed above was a separate keyword that generated its own csv via the ad library. These csv's were then uploaded into a Python dataframe and concatenated into a single dataframe. Each row represents a different ad that ran on Meta's platforms and was paid for by a pink slime news parent organization.

The number of Facebook users in Bulgaria was forecast to continuously increase between 2024 and 2028 by in total 0.4 million users (+11.56 percent). After the ninth consecutive increasing year, the Facebook user base is estimated to reach 3.87 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 150 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, the number of Facebook users in Canada amounted to 28 million and is projected to grow to over 34 million million by 2029. The current Facebook usage penetration in Canada is about 77 percent of the population. Social media in CanadaSocial networking is a popular online activity in Canada. Most recently, 68.5 percent of the population accessed social networks via any device on a monthly basis. Unsurprisingly, Facebook was ranked first in terms of popularity among Canadian internet users, with 25 to 34-year-olds constituting the biggest user group. Mobile social media in CanadaMobile social media access is also increasingly popular, with mobile websites and social apps generating a significant amount of Canadian social traffic. In March 2019, Facebook generated more than half of mobile social website visits in Canada. The most downloaded social apps in Canada include WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Facebook and Pinterest, again highlighting Facebook’s dominance in the Canadian social media market.

We've put together a list of the latest Truth Social statistics so you can see who uses the platform and whether or not Truth Social is likely to become a dominant social media network in the future.

The number of Facebook users in Israel was forecast to decrease between 2024 and 2028 by in total 0.1 million users (-1.7 percent). This overall decrease does not happen continuously, notably not in 2026. The Facebook user base is estimated to amount to 5.8 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 150 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).Find more key insights for the number of Facebook users in countries like Oman and Lebanon.

Brand performance data collected from AI search platforms for the query "combine facebook and google ads data".

Replication notes To replicate the analysis refer to replication_code.pdf; replication_code.Rmd. Paper abstract Since changing its algorithm in January 2018 to boost the content of family and friends over other content (including news), Facebook has signalled that it is less interested in news. The long-term impacts of this change for news publishers is still unclear. This is a problem because policymakers and legislators across the world are concerned about the relationship between platforms and publishers. In particular, they are worried that the ability of platforms to make unilateral decisions about how their algorithms operate may harm the economic sustainability of journalism. This article provides some clarity around the relationship between these two parties through a longitudinal study of the Australian news media sector’s relationship with Facebook from 2014 – 2020, with a particular focus on the January 2018 algorithm change. We analyse Facebook data (2,082,804 posts from CrowdTangle) and external traffic data from 32 major Australian news outlets. This data is contextualised by additional desk research. We identify a range of trends including the decline of news sharing, the collapse in the performance of ‘social news’, the variable position of social media as a source of referral traffic and most critically, the diffused nature of the 2018 algorithm change. Our approach cannot make direct causal inferences. We can only identify trends in on-platform performance and referral traffic, which we then contextualise with industry reportage. However, the data provides vital longitudinal insights into the performance and responses of individual media outlets, news categories and the Australian media sector as a whole.