Facebook announced it had reached its 1 billionth monthly active user today. It also released additional data about photo uploads, mobile usage and check-ins. Here are the numbers (bold is my emphasis):
- Over 1.13 trillion likes since launch in February 2009
- 140.3 billion friend connections
- 219 billion photos uploaded
- 17 billion location-tagged posts, including check-ins: Includes location-tagged posts as well as check-ins. Data was pulled 9/10/2012, and represents total location-tagged posts & check-ins since launch of the product in August 2010
- The median age of the user is about 22
- The top five countries where people connected from at the time we reached this milestone were Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico and the United States (in alphabetical order)
- Facebook now has 600M mobile users
These are remarkable numbers but they also mask Facebook’s inability so far to develop products for key market segments. As I’ve argued before the company really has no “product” for SMBs. Facebook Ads ain’t it (maybe mobile offers is applicable). Accordingly Facebook is falling way short on a big revenue opportunity around SMB presence, customer acquisition and loyalty.
Facebook also doesn’t really have a local product for consumers, which in turn affects SMBs and national-locals. The company dabbled in deals and got out quickly (though mobile offers are back). It flirted with payments and it developed a Q&A product that could have been huge, if properly executed. The latter has now, it appears, been quietly shuttered.
Facebook is starting to play in search (and sponsored search ads) but until the company can bring structured local and mobile “utility” to Facebook users it will have difficulty across the board in monetizing SMBs or delivering real value to local consumers — notwithstanding all the location-tagged posts, Wal-Mart “daughter” sites/pages and consumer check-ins.
October 8th, 2012 at 11:44 pm
1 Billion active users in a month! Yet, they haven’t properly montetized this user base yet.
Is it that Zuck doesn’t understand what easy wins there are out there to make some easy money? Here’s some examples:
- Charge developers for using the Facebook Connect service. This is a great service that they are currently giving away for free.
- Charge SMB’s for directory listings. $99 a year to be on Facebook would be a no-brainer!
- Search. Even if they got 10% of the search market from Google that would be worth Billions of dollars per year.
- Mobile Ads. Why don’t they have any ads on their mobile app(s)?
Why is Zuck sitting on his hands on this stuff? He should get moving before both Wall Street and his user-base moves on.
October 9th, 2012 at 3:01 pm
They’re obviously very focused on mobile. Their online ad exchange and an equivalent development in mobile will improve their position. However, users may continue to lose interest in the site, which is a much larger problem: declining engagement.