Statistics Update Reveals that More Than One Million Web Sites are Using Facebook's Platform

Facebook recently updated its official company Statistics page with some new data points about how people are using the service. The single biggest update is that the company now says that more than one million web sites have integrated with its developer platform, whether via its new social plugins or other features. Facebook has also removed or re-described some information that it used to share. Here's a quick look at all of the changes. The stats page is divided up into a few different sections. The top one, called "People on Facebook," still says that more than 400 million people are using the site every month, like it did in February, and it still says that half of them log on every day, and that the average user has 130 friends. It also says that people spend more than 500 billion minutes per month on the service. Facebook has also moved detailed stats on features like status updates, photos, events and Pages to the next section, "Activity on Facebook." And while it previously listed out details on specific features like status updates, events, photos and Pages -- see our February writeup for more on that -- it has now grouped them together. The company says there are more than 160 million "objects" that people interact with; objects are defined as Pages, groups and events. The average user is connected to 60 of these objects, and creates 70 "pieces of content" each month (definition: "web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc."). Overall, it says that more than 25 billion pieces of content are shared every month. In February, it said that 5 billion pieces of content were being created each week -- assuming that it means the same thing by "created" and "shared," the number of pieces of content have grown from slightly above 20 billion a month to 25 billion. That increase isn't surprising considering that Facebook has continued to gain millions of new users every month. Skipping over the "Global Reach" section -- data here hasn't changed aside from its name, which used to be "International Growth" -- we come to the Platform section. It has some big new numbers. The first change isn't that big, though, as the number of active applications has grown from 500,000 to 550,000. But next, instead of 80,000 web sites having implemented Facebook Connect, the company now says that more than one million web sites have integrated with the platform. This difference is due, in a large part, to Facebook's launch of the Like Box and other social plugins in late April; the company said this week that more than 300,000 sites have already implemented the plugins, and the number appear to still be climbing. These sites aren't just small personal blogs, as CNN and many other online publications have been successfully experimenting with the plugins. And that's not all. While Facebook previously said that more than 60 million people "engage with Facebook Connect" on other sites, it now says that the number is up to 150 million. Note that we're assuming, based on Facebook's phrasing, that this means actually using Facebook on other sites rather than just happening to load sites that have the Like Box. The reason for this qualification is that widget companies are notorious for purposefully conflating these sorts of numbers.

Social Pro Daily

Statistics Update Reveals that More Than One Million Web Sites are Using Facebook's Platform

Eric Eldon

About

Subscriptions

Events

Publications

WORK SMARTER - LEARN, GROW AND BE INSPIRED.

Subscribe today!

Eric Eldon