Facebook: Big, Sticky, & Growing

last night was one of those magic Silicon Valley moments i treasure...

  Facebook by the numbers.

i managed to get invited to a geeks-only tech event Facebook was hosting in downtown Palo Alto to recruit new blood.  i was expecting typical geeky valley schmooze, but halfway thru the event founders Dustin Moskovitz & Mark Zuckerberg did a short presentation on facebook platform growth, metrics, & scalability that was pretty darn impressive.

i'm familiar with Facebook stats, however seeing them in detail really is quite amazing.  while MySpace is much larger in overall users (est 150M?), Facebook blows them (and everyone else) away in terms of user stickiness... half of all their users login *daily*.  i don't know of any other site with that level of usage frequency for such a broad group of users.  zuckerberg commented that based on current usage & growth (18M users growing ~3% week-week), they might even catch & exceed MySpace page views within the year.  also impressive was the anecdote that after graduation, facebook users are *still* almost half as active as in their college years.  if they can keep that up, the service will soon be more than just a college site / demographic (see slides for growth in 25-34 & older demos).

beyond just the #'s tho was the way Dustin & 'Zuck' talked about the company & their future (i felt timewarped back a few years to the PayPal heydays with Max & Peter & the gang).  it's obvious these guys see a huge future ahead of them, and paint a really compelling vision of where they're going... "change the world" kind of stuff.  hearing the story up close, i can perhaps understand how they had the balls to turn down a reported $1B Yahoo buyout offer, maybe even start to believe the $8B number Peter was tossing around.  who knows, with that kind of growth...

anyway, it's not often you get to see & hear an Internet superstar like Facebook talk about what's coming next.  living in Silicon Valley, i sometimes take for granted that i'm lucky enough to get the chance on an amazingly frequent basis to hear folks from Google, Yahoo, YouTube, eBay/PayPal, etc talk about their company and future. 

(and for those who don't know what i'm talking about, come find out at Web 2.0 Expo in April... yes, i'm a co-chair for the event: plug.)

congrats to facebook on their success, and good luck writing the next chapter of the Internet Revolution...

Comments

[Giovanni Gallucci]

I also agree that the stickiness is insane, but I'm still hard pressed to believe that anyone is going to pay for the site at a price tag that equates to over $400.00 per user. Seriously, how does one pay that kind of money for a group's attention and make it pay off in the end?

[Damon Billian]

50% login daily? That's insane!

LinkedIn, a company I like, most certainly does have to keep an eye on these guys. If the "college" crowd uses the tool to find jobs & network for jobs on Facebook in the future, watch out.

[Neil]

I'm in the middle of the social network generation - all my friends are between the age of 20 and 23, so I can tell you that everyone my age in the UK is using Facebook - forget about MySpace.

In comparison to Facebook, MySpace is such a mess. 404's, illegible profiles, and dodgy widgets have all paved the way for a social network that actually enables you to communicate. And communicating with your contacts is so much easier in Facebook; so much so that my peers and I actually expect to receive event invitations through Facebook (I'd tell any event focused startup to simply forget it, invest the cash in something else, because Facebook have this covered).

Facebook will at least rival MySpace in the not so distant future, and most likely surpass it in subscriber numbers. The 'Live Feed' will be recognised for the killer feature that it is.

[Steve Algieri]

Those are some really amazing numbers. 120TB for Photo's! They must be thinking about buying EMC or something.

Rather than being the prey, I think these guys could start becoming the hunters.

[Robert Dewey]

I seen those stats, and my jaw dropped. While I'm not sure about the $8B mark, I can imagine it being one of the bigger acquisitions in the web business. YouTube went for ~$1.5B, so I could see $2-3B for Facebook.

And to think... They probably started this "business" with a hard night of coding and a six pack of RedBull (or beer, if you're really hardcore, hah).