Facebook passes 200 million users

Facebook recently announced that they have now surpassed 200 million users. To put this into perspective: If Facebook were a country, it would be the world’s fifth largest by population - larger than Brazil or Russia. Compare this to MySpace, which has plateaued at about 130 million users - a bit larger than the population of Japan. 

The chart below illustrates the relative traffic between Facebook and MySpace ( with Twitter thrown in for good measure ). You can see the steady growth of Facebook traffic over the last 12 months

On the whole, social networking services appear poised for continued growth as they begin to attract an older demographic. According to a recent report from Nielsen Online, more people are already logging in to social networks than are using online email services such as Yahoo! and GMail ( link to PDF ). 

More importantly, social networking remains the primary growth area for online marketing. A full 25% of the small businesses surveyed by Ad-ology Research plan to increase spending this year.

We expect this trend to continue as businesses look for more cost-effective ways to promote their brand - and as technologies such as Facebook Connect and Google’s Social Graph API create innovative new ways to expand the reach of social networks.