Facebook announced this morning that they now reach 500 million active users (just five and half years after launching). But where do these half a billion users reside? Refreshing my post from February, the share of users from Asia continues to rise and now stands at 17% of all Facebook users1.
Africa is the other fast-growth region and I’m expecting the region’s share of active Facebook users to rise sharply over the next year. In terms of market potential, the number of active users in Asia is 2.3% of the population (1% in Africa) so the company still has lots of growth potential in the region:
The share of users age 18-25 remains higher in regions outside the U.S., especially in Asia, the Middle East / North Africa, Africa, and South America. 14% of users in the U.S. are 55 or older, the corresponding figure in Asia is 2% (in Europe and Africa it’s 6%, in the M. East/N. Africa it’s 3%, in South America it’s 4% ). [For recent growth rates by age group, click HERE.]
Over the past 12 weeks, Facebook added over a million active users in fourteen countries, including 5 in Asia and all three members of NAFTA:
I close with a list of countries where Facebook is growing the fastest2:
Update (7/22/2010): Here are some interactive heat maps generated via OpenHeatMap. First, the number of active Facebook users:
Second, the rate-of-change in number of active Facebook users over the last 12 weeks:
(1) Data for this post is through the week ending 7/18/2010 and covers the 180+ countries where Facebook has a presence.
(2) Rate-of-change: Measures percentage change in # of active users over the last 12 weeks.