Facebook ‘Almost Guaranteed’ to Reach 1 Billion Users, Founder Says

Facebook’s growth isn’t really news anymore. The social network has proven unstoppable and is getting close to the 500-million-users milestone. And, while the growth rate seems to have slowed down, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg seems confident that the one-billion-users mark is not that far off.

Speaking at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival, part of a European tour of sorts for the CEO, Zuckerberg made it clear that the site was very close to world domination. In fact, he claims that Facebook is leading in social networking in all but four countries, Russia, Japan, China and South Korea.

That sounds impressive, but it may be a bit of a stretch, at least according to more indirect data. It’s almost guaranteed that there are more than four markets where Facebook is not leading. Google’s Orkut has been leading in Brazil for years, but maybe Facebook has managed to overtake it recently.

But that would still leave countries like Iran and other Arab ones and also Ukraine and other Russian-speaking states where VKontakte leads. Most likely, what he meant was that the four were just the big markets where Facebook wasn’t the top social network.

But they may prove the toughest to crack, though. Japan and, to a lesser degree, South Korea are pretty resistant to outside companies and this is true on the web as well. In Russia and other Russian-speaking countries, VKontakte is fairly entrenched. And China has proven an insurmountable challenge even for Google.

Still, Zuckerberg is fairly confident that Facebook will hit one billion users eventually, though likely not this year. In fact, it seems that even the 500-million-users number, which has been floating around, may have been optimistic. Sources from inside Facebook say the site is on track to reach the milestone by mid-July. 600 million users are well within reach for this year, but the one-billion landmark will probably be reached in 2011, maybe as late as 2012.