Facebook Announces 1 Billion Users and Other Likeable Facts

The world’s largest social media network continues to grow. In an exclusive interview on NBC Thursday morning, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) Co-founder and CEO, announced that the company reached a total of 1 billion active users worldwide as of September 14.

Hitting the 1 billion user milestone means that roughly one out of every seven people on the planet are connected to Facebook. Considering that the Internet itself has fewer than 3 billion users worldwide, the company’s milestone is even more impressive. It took the social juggernaut six years to reach 500 million users, but only two years to double it. As of June 30, 2012, Facebook had 955 million monthly active users. In comparison, other popular networking sites such as LinkedIn (NYSE:LNKD) and Yelp (NYSE:YELP) have about 175 million and 80 million users, respectively.

Catalysts are critical to discovering winning stocks. Check out our newest CHEAT SHEET stock picks now.

Although Facebook has seen a wide variety of negative reaction due to its initial public offering, Zuckerberg explained from the beginning that the site was not originally created to be a company, but rather to make the world more open and connected. In a press release, Zuckerberg explains his thoughts on the 1 billion user achievement.

“This morning, there are more than one billion people using Facebook actively each month. If you’re reading this: thank you for giving me and my little team the honor of serving you. Helping a billion people connect is amazing, humbling and by far the thing I am most proud of in my life. I am committed to working every day to make Facebook better for you, and hopefully together one day we will be able to connect the rest of the world too.”

Facebook also listed the following likeable facts for shareholders:

• Facebook reached 1 billion monthly active users on September 14 at 12:45 PM Pacific time.
• Since Facebook launched, it has experienced over 1.13 trillion likes, 140.3 billion friend connections and 219 billion photos uploaded. Pushing into Pandora’s (NYSE:P) territory, a whopping 62.6 million songs have been played 22 billion times, representing about 210,000 years of music.
• Since September 10, 2012, Facebook has logged 17 billion location-tagged posts, including check-ins. This represents total location-tagged posts and check-ins since the product launched in August 2010.
• The median age of the 1 billion users is about 22. In alphabetical order, the top five countries where people connected from at the time Facebook hit its billion milestone were Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico and the United States. In comparison, the median age of users when Facebook hit 100 million users in 2008 was about 26. The top five countries at the time were Chile, France, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Investor Insight: Facebook: The Next E-Commerce Game Changer?