According to the company’s latest figures, social media giant Facebook is approaching the two billion user mark.
It has been revealed that the number of people using the site has risen to 1.94 billion, with 1.3 billion of these users accessing the site on a daily basis. This means that around one quarter of the world’s population is now registered with Facebook.
The majority of its new users are coming from outside the company’s native North America and Europe, suggesting that more people from around the world are now becoming connected to the internet – and this is an objective of the digital enterprise that first planned to send off internet bearing drones into remote areas of the world in 2014.
The social network was founded 13 years ago in 2004 and is expected to reach the two billion user milestone in the next few weeks. As well as more people signing up to the network, its statistics also showed that users are accessing the site more often, with the 1.3 billion people who use it more often equating to two thirds of the site’s user base.
The two billion milestone is set to become the latest in its successful and relatively short history. The company first hit 100 million users in 2008 before reaching the one billion mark four years later in 2012. Now, five years later, it is set to double that figure.
Furthermore, the US tech firm announced profits of $3bn (£2.4bn) in the first quarter of 2017 and these figures represent a 76% increase compared to the same quarter of last year. Despite this growth in both user numbers and profit, the company has warned that growth in advertising revenues is set to slow down, with David Wehner, Facebook’s chief financial officer, saying that the company was hitting a limit on the number of adverts it can fit onto users’ pages.
Away from the statistics, the company has come under much pressure in recent weeks over the way it has been handling the darker side of social media, including hate speech and fake news. Earlier in the week, company chief executive and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg announced that the firm was employing an additional 3,000 employees to help moderate the content posted to the site.
Talking about the size of his company’s user base, Zuckerberg has said that this will give Facebook the opportunity to expand the roles of the site, and has again hinted that it could move into television, as well as fields like politics and healthcare.
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[…] Instagram is quickly becoming one of the most important social media platforms to both millennials and Gen Z and is one of the fastest growing networks, having hit the 700 million active user mark in April, according to Statista. This leaves it some way behind parent company, Facebook, which is quickly approaching the two billion user milestone. […]