Facebook Surpasses 200 Million Users

This is a hard number to put your head around, but 200 million people will be a part of the Facebook social network by this time next week.  There are so many things that I feel like have contributed to Facebook’s rapid growth, but probably the biggest factor is the quality of their product.  Facebook offers an incredible user experience and is a very controlled environment that respects privacy, unlike MySpace in so many ways…

I would however like to see a side by side comparison between Twitter and Facebook in terms of new user % since the first of the year.  The media has given Twitter such a boost in the first quarter of this year that it has to be creeping up in terms of new users to Facebook.

Tomorrow Facebook should theoretically be crossing the 200 million users level tomorrow based on our estimates but according to Wei Zhu of Facebook, the number could be as high as 280 million. While speaking at a Facebook Tech Talk, Wei Zhu slips and says that the site has 250 million users if not 280 million users (I’ve included the video below). At that point a communications person (I’d assume) jumps in to correct him on the number to 200 million.
Regardless of if it’s greater, they have confirmed that they at least surpassed 200 million and if growth keeps at this pace, the company should easily surpass 300 million before the end of the third quarter (if not earlier based on what Wei Zhu said). It was a wide range of numbers that Wei Zhu provided but most likely he was just confused about the numbers.

So is Mike Arrington’s suggestion that Facebook is understating their numbers by a huge sum accurate or was his take on it just linkbait? My guess it was linkbait since that’s how they roll and this time, they’ve baited the fish. Nothing like some old fashion speculating on a Friday night!

The site continues to experience tremendous growth and we will continue following that growth all the way up. The real question is how far the company will go before it begins to peak. Right now the site is adding around 1 million new domestic users a week which also helps to increase revenues substantially since U.S. ad revenue accounts for the majority of Facebook’s income.

If the site doesn’t slow down in the growth internationally, Facebook is going to become one extremely expensive behemoth to run (as if it wasn’t already). Then again, when you have the majority of online users connected via your site, revenue can’t be that big of a problem, can it?

Facebook Surpasses 200 Million Users