Facebook confirms it now has 800 million users
To kick off its 2011 f8 developer conference today, Facebook let Saturday Night Live's Andy Sandberg impersonate Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Sandberg said a lot of things in his fake keynote, but almost all of them were simply to poke fun at Zuckerberg, Facebook, and to introduce amusingly ludicrous features.
I say almost all of them, because one was in fact true: Facebook now has 800 million active users. A Facebook spokesperson confirmed with me that the social network did indeed reach this milestone. This number could be of course much bigger (and Google actually claims it is) but 800 million is what's official, straight from the horse's mouth.
When Zuckerberg came on stage, he didn't confirm what Sandberg had revealed. Instead, he noted that the social network had recently seen 500 million users log onto Facebook in 24 hours. That was a shocking number, although Facebook has already said before that more than 50 percent of the website's active users log on to Facebook in any given day.
Still, while the daily number was huge, it was just one particular day. Web properties tend to be compared in monthly numbers. As such, the new 800 million active users may not be as shocking, but it's still significant: Facebook is now 80 percent of the way to its 1 billion number.
In July, Facebook confirmed it had over 750 million monthly active users. In other words, the company added some 50 million monthly active users over the last two months.
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