Facebook Climbs Toward 700 Million Users Worldwide, With Steady Growth in the US

Discrepancies among third party measurement services partially obscure what still looks like a steady growth rate for Facebook in the US and around the world. According to the data we track in our Inside Facebook Gold service, Facebook grew by 21.5 million new users in March to reach 661.5 million monthly active users worldwide. That's somewhat more than what comScore shows, rather less than what Google's Ad Planner tool seems to show. We expect Facebook to reach 700 million monthly active users within a month or two, based on most measures. More data is available on the US. Here, we tracked Facebook growing by 2.78 million people to reach nearly 155 million monthly actives, the typical monthly amount we've been seeing lately, and which comScore mostly closely matches. The other services are all over the place. You can find last month's version of this article here, which we reference below. The other trend to note from below is that Twitter had a healthy March in the US and around the world. Compete Facebook gained nearly 7 million new users in the US in March, following an almost imperceptible increase in February. It now has nearly 141 million monthly unique visitors. Compete also appears to have made some revisions to its numbers from recent months, as well -- roughly a 6 million increase for each recent month. For example, the last time we looked at a cross-section of third-party data about Facebook traffic, we see tracked 127.5 million in January -- today, January is showing 133.7 million in Compete's graphing tool. Facebook's most direct current competitors in the US are Twitter and MySpace. After a slight loss in February, Twitter grew by nearly 4 million users to reach 31 million uniques. Apparently reversing many months of falls, MySpace grew a couple million to reach 39.4 million uniques. ComScore In contrast to those last numbers, Facebook fell from 153 million unique visitors in January to less than 151 million in February then rose back by nearly 3 million to almost reach 153 million according to comScore. Meanwhile, MySpace fell by around one and a half million to end at 36.1 million and Twitter rose by almost 2.5 million to 25.6 million uniques. The stats company also provides us with worldwide numbers. After staying almost flat in February, Facebook continued what has been pretty typical growth of 15 million or so new worldwide users every month, gaining 16.2 million in March to reach 693 million. MySpace stopped falling, at 62.3 million. Twitter recovered from a slight February drop by growing more than Facebook -- 17.2 million more monthly unique visitors worldwide. It now has almost 130 million total. Google Ad Planner The graph showing daily active users climbing above 300 million today is the same as what we saw more than a month ago. However, Google's DoubleClick Ad Planner service shows Facebook with an extremely high 860 million monthly active users, fully 270 million above what we previously recorded. We're not sure what accounted for the difference. Quantcast Finally, we have Quantcast's US rankings for February available. Facebook fell from 137 million to 136 million, MySpace continued dropping -- by around 3.5 million to 24.2 million uniques -- and Twitter continued a healthy climb, by 2 million up to a shockingly high 90 million uniques.

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Facebook Climbs Toward 700 Million Users Worldwide, With Steady Growth in the US

Eric Eldon

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Eric Eldon