It doesn't necessarily mean that. 2/7ths of the world's population logging in to FB once every two months would result in the same MAU number, even with zero people logging on _every_ month.

Moreover, these MAU numbers probably include people like me, who receive a push notification of a message sent to a group, click it once to view the message, and quit the app after 2 seconds.

It's still a large number, though!

That's probably the wrong way to interpret that number.

Many people have multiple devices (phones/tablets) and people have multiple accounts as well.

Still an impressive number nonetheless, even if it was 1/10th of the world's population...

No, the original was correct. That's 1.07B distinct people.

Crazier, IMO, is the DAU. 829 million log in EVERY DAY.

And how many are spam?

(I get friended by 3 clearly fake facebook accounts a week at this point ...)

That is weird. As these things go, I'm reasonably high profile. I'm also connected to some vertices of extremely high degree. I get zero fake friend requests per week.

Twitter? Flooded with fake connections. Facebook? I can't remember the last one I saw.

It can depend a bit on geography. Facebook.jp has a suspiciously high number of attractive young ladies in Ogaki (as in, literally, more than the number of 18 to 22 year old young ladies in Ogaki) who send friend requests for, I assume, the purpose of developing marks for scams.

I'm also one degree of separation from two countries in Southeast Asia and this causes me to get a lot of friend requests of dubious provenance.

And yet increasing their revenue 7x still wouldn't let them match Google financially.

What they've achieved is no doubt impressive but there is still a lot to figure out in the model to extract as much as possible from all those users.

Close.

GOOG sales: $16b for the latest quarter; FB sales: $2.9b; 5.5 fold difference

GOOG net income: $3.39b; FB net income: $791m; 3.84 fold difference

Also, Facebook was founded 6 years after Google. I think Facebook is following the same trajectory if not doing better than Google at the time.

Are they including Whats App users in that number? Because that would help explain it.

The whatsapp deal hasn't closed, so no.

I don't think the numbers include instagram either, it hasn't been monetized and therefore irrelevant to financials.

Edit: Confirmed, doesn't include instagram users. In the earnings slides http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/AMDA-NJ5DZ/3349527922...

> The number of DAUs, mobile DAUs, MAUs, and mobile MAUs do not include Instagram users unless they would otherwise qualify as such users, respectively, based on their other activities on Facebook.

I would think it's fair assumption that a significant percentage of those users are being counted multiple times if they have duplicate accounts.

EDIT: I don't see how the above statement beckons downvotes. Yes. It was an assumption, but not absurd one at that. Here's one such article that talks about fake accounts -- http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/02/tech/social-media/facebook-fak...

EDIT2: Last year Facebook said 4.8% of their MAU was duplicate, misclassified, or spam accounts. That's 51+ million today assuming the percentage has remained constant.

It's not a fair assumption. It's a cynical assumption. And an incorrect assumption. Why don't you be a little more careful?

Who has duplicate accounts on Facebook?

Every social media employee? I would guess most have separate personal accounts and accounts used to manage their company's pages.

That's not how Facebook Pages work - a Page isn't an account you log into, it's something your main Facebook account can have admin rights to (and a Page can have multiple administrators). I have admin rights on a few Facebook Pages but I only count as a single active user, and I don't have to log out of my Gregor account to administer them.

Historically, some brands did create full Facebook accounts, but Facebook now discourages that and as far as I know most brands are using Pages now. For a while Zuck's dog, Beast, was a notable exception (he had a Facebook account long after that was discouraged) but it looks like he's just got a Page now.

(I used to work at Facebook.)

I don't recall Beast ever having anything but a Page - in fact, I remember that Zuck mentioning in a Q&A that he was using Beast to get a better feeling about what it's like to run a Page.

Could be - I think my memory of the non-Page account dates to mid-2011, and that's plenty long enough ago for my memory to play tricks on me.

GREGOR!

how many social media employees do you think there are? do you think it's a significant number at this scale?

I'm not sure that has a significant impact on the numbers :)

Fake accounts != Duplicate accounts

Wait for Google with their subsidized Android One phones in India and China to see more than 1/7th...

No Facebook in China. Facebook mostly faces political growth limits right now...

No G+ in China either.