Facebook Casually Announces 750 Million Users Landmark

Facebook held a press event to unveil its new video call feature, in partnership with Skype. Mark Zuckerberg was on hand to make the announcement and also talk about what Facebook's been up to lately.

He took the occasion to provide the first official user count update since last summer, Facebook now has 750 million monthly active users. This has been estimated for some time.

Zuckerberg said that there were no previous announcements or a dedicated event since the total number of users is not really a relevant number for engagement.

That said, Facebook has always provided active user numbers as opposed to registered users. As such, at least 750 million people have logged into Facebook in the last month, so the number is an indicator of activity. Granted, logging in once a month is not really engaging with the site.

Zuckerberg also said that he hoped Facebook would hit one billion users soon. It took the social network a full year to get 250 million more users, significantly more than it took it to reach 500 million users, which it announced a year ago.

Facebook saw a period of exponential growth and some truly impressive numbers in and around 2009. Growth has slowed down somewhat, but it seems slow only because Facebook grew so fast previously.

A 50 percent increase in the number of active users in a year, for a site that is already the biggest thing on the web, is still impressive. Facebook is on its way of becoming the most popular website on the planet.

Already it is very close to being the biggest in terms of unique visitors, it's clearly the biggest when counting only single websites. In terms of time spent on the site, Facebook already has a big advantage.

Google has about one billion monthly active users, but this is across all of its sites. Google+ may already have a few million users, according to some estimates, but it is very early to know how it will scale, since it's not even open to the public yet.