Facebook’s Internal Stats Show People Are Sharing More

Facebook’s Internal Stats Show People Are Sharing More: "

When Facebook announced that it had reached 300 million monthly active users last week, it also updated granular statistics about what its users are doing on the site. Here’s a closer look at how these numbers have changed versus the last set the company released in July. Most striking is the increase in overall shared items, the number of photo and video uploads, and the rapid rise in mobile adoption.

As a baseline comparison, we’re looking at these numbers versus Facebook says its overall traffic is. On July 15th, when the last set came out, it said it had 250 million users. So the company’s overall monthly active user base has grown 20 percent. All of the numbers that it updated last week show at least as much growth as Facebook’s overall traffic. In other words, these stats are not growing purely because the total number of Facebook users is growing — instead, it appears that Facebook users actually are sharing more as time goes on.

Status updates: 40 million users are updating their statuses at least once each day, a 25 percent increase from the 30 million who did as of July. [Update: This isn't quite right, as the terminology has changed since July. Now, it says 'More than 40 million status updates each day' -- which does not necessarily mean that there are 40 million users updating their statuses once a day.]

Pages: 10 million users became fans of a page each day, up 20 percent from the 8 million who did in July.

Videos: 14 million videos are now being uploaded each month, up from 40 percent from 10 million.

Photos: 2 billion photos are now being uploaded each month, double the 1 billion before.

Shared content: 2 billion pieces of content, whether links, posts, photos or anything else, are now shared each week — doubling shared items as of July.

Mobile: Earlier this month, Facebook said that 65 million people accessed the site through a mobile device. In July, only 30 million people did — that’s a whopping 117 percent increase.

Facebook’s overall goal is to get more people sharing more information, in part so it can learn more about them, and then target ads to them more accurately. The numbers suggest that this plan is working, no doubt aided by ongoing improvements to features like status updates and video uploading. These sharing increases — not just overall traffic growth — could be contributing to Facebook’s revenue growth.

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