The Facts and Figures from Facebook

Monthly active users now total 901 million (up from 680 million a year ago)

One in 7.7 people in the world have a Facebook account.

Daily active users are up to 526 million (up from 372 million last year)

Monthly mobile users now total 488 million

Eighty-three million monthly active users accessed Facebook solely from mobile in the month ending March 31, 2012

300 million photos are uploaded to the site each day

3.2 billion Likes and Comments are posted daily

Hosts 125 billion friendships

Revenue for the first quarter of 2012 was $1.058 billion, up from $731 million last year

Facebook expects to raise $5 billion in its IPO

Facebook’s estimated value will be close to $100 billion after the IPO

Facebook paid Instagram the equivalent of $1.01 billion for its business

Facebook will pay Instagram a $200 million termination fee if government authorities prevent the acquisition from being completed

If Facebook increased its current revenue rate it will make from $4.69 to $4.81 on each of its 901 million users each year

Facebook hosts 42 million “Pages” with 10 or more likes

There are currently 9 million Facebook “apps”

Facebook owns 774 of its own US patents

Facebook bought an additional 650 patents from Microsoft for $550 million

Zygna the online games company (which includes Farmville) contributes 15% of Facebook revenue

Facebook currently has 3,539 full-time employees

There are 9 million Facebook "apps" and not a single one of them is useful.

Some are entertaining.

Most have been destroyed by Facebook itself or by competition with other apps.

Most of the best developers I know have left the Facebook platform in favor of iPhone where they can make a lot more money.

900 million active users; 500 million mobile users.

And yet Facebook is not the dominant social platform in China, Japan, or Russia.

So the question I have is: has Facebook reached to saturation point where they will struggle to grow?

Or is it safe to say that the first thing new Internet users sign up for is not email, it's Facebook, and they're now growing as fast as the Internet is growing.

Good point. They're reaching those end of the ponzi scheme type numbers where you need the population of the earth in order to grow.

Might be time to focus on increasing engagement and monetization. ;)

where's the real value to the end user... and how many of those users are truly unique? what makes a user unique - their login? their page(s)? what constitutes 900 million users? I could, based on the number of email addresses i have right now, have 5 different facebook pages? if i follow the thread on the revenue model, then each page i own makes me unique in facebook parlance because it's another entity that they can grab info from to sell as well as real estate for pay-per click ads. all of these seem very much like vanity metrics to me. if i am one person with 5 pages then what is the real value-proposition to their paying customers? especially if - for all of the pay-per click ads i MIGHT click - none of those clicks results in a conversion for the paying clients?

in some regard, the number of users that facebook reports reminds me of how within days of getting active on twitter again (after a 3 year hiatus) i had 100 followers. when i reviewed them, 98 of them were porn sites, which i unfollowed and blocked because there was no value-add to me having those sites as followers - if i tweet out a rocking blog post chances are high that those "gals" will be "too busy" to read it...

facebook's biggest down side is their complete control over the platform and their inability to allow end users to customize anything. and their UX sucks. and don't get me started on their privacy policies.

i suspect that within the next 12 months they will struggle to continue to add users - especially as other social platforms gain strength - but they will use some of the capital they raise at their IPO to execute on a pivot. the question i would like an answer to is what will that pivot mean to the scores of freemium users?

all of which makes me wonder in general about this: how many social platforms would one user be willing to use every day and for how long each day and why?

Not many. That's why social platforms are Winner-Take-All.

There would be vastly more innovation and valuable companies created if micro-messaging and the social graph were open protocols.

Facebook hosts 42 million “Pages” with 10 or more likes...

This number seems both really low and really high.

Really low: only 42 million pages, versus 900 million profiles.

Really high: how the heck are there 42 million brands that people like?

Doesn't pages include more than big brands? I have one for bakadesuyo, you have one to handle friend overflow, and often there are separate pages for each local franchise of big brands (every individual movie theater or retail store), college clubs, big events, many are joke pages, dead pages no longer used, failed experiments... I can quickly see this adding up.

if the money people are not hedging their bets... http://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/2012/02/02/analysis-sobering-look-at-facebook/

Pages do include more than big brands. That's why I think the number is really low.

And wow, that Fox Business report is skeptical!

I think smart investors are skeptical. Not wishing FB any IPO ill-will....Just think there is good reason for the skepticism. Found the difference in views of the IPO between those investors who bought shares in the "private market" and those considering buying in the open market interesting...

Just because Facebook owns two of the biggest mobile apps does not mean Facebook understands mobile: http://pandawhale.com/convo/1507/mobile-facebook-and-google-cant-live-with-it-and-they-cant-live-without-it-techcrunch

Facebook could disappear if it does not figure out the mobile opportunity: http://pandawhale.com/convo/1367/google-and-facebook-could-disappear-in-the-next-5-years