The Facebook Billion

One in seven people on the Earth use Facebook. Given that 1.5 billion are under the age of 12, that means one in five and a half eligible people use Facebook. Once we factor in countries that don’t have or allow Facebook it gets higher. With its market cap running at $46.8 billion that means that, if it were to remain at this level of use, it would have to earn $47 per active user in net present discounted value terms.

But there are some other interesting stats about all of that. Facebook claim the median age of a user is 22. Is that the median stated age or have they adjusted for the known large share of their user base who are under 12? That median age has been falling. When Facebook was half the size, the median age is 23 and when it was a tenth of the size it was 26. The top countries, however, are much the same although it has become less English speaking centric since the early days.

What does all this mean? Not much. Facebook is big because the Internet is big. It isn’t the only one out there who has leveraged that. Indeed, in the list of Top 50 brands released today, Facebook is not there (it is off the list at 69) and when you look at who is on the list you see that even in the tech space, Facebook haven’t transcended the product as a company.

I am still bullish on Facebook’s prospects but they haven’t yet established themselves in the stats that will really matter. (To be sure, I don’t mean the brand one per se but perhaps the ad revenue numbers).