500 million mobile users, 83 million only use the mobile sites or apps

Apr 24, 2012 11:40 GMT  ·  By

With its initial public offer (IPO) looming, Facebook has published more details of its operations. Apart from the financial aspects, Facebook also updated its user stats. The site now has 901 million monthly active users, people who visit the site or interact with the service in some way at least once a month.

That's up from 845 million, the latest official figure, from December. The growth rate has been slowing for the past couple of years, but Facebook will reach 1 billion users by the end of 2012.

Facebook had 680 million monthly active users in March 2011 and saw an increase of 33 percent in March 2012.

What's interesting about Facebook is that the social network provides relevant data such as active users rather than just registered users or the ambiguous "engaged" users Google provides for Google+.

More important than monthly active users are the people that constantly engage with the site and Facebook is not lacking here. 526 million people visit the site each day, a 41 percent increase from 372 million at the end of March 2011.

Facebook also revealed an even more impressive metric, 398 million people were active for six of the last seven days during March 2012, indicating that close to half of Facebook users are always returning to the site as part of their daily routine.

Mobile usage is equally impressive, the site had 488 million monthly active mobile users in March and reached 500 million as of April 20. Of the 488 million in March, 83 million visited Facebook exclusively via mobile devices, the websites or the mobile apps.

It's not just the user numbers that are impressive, usage is through the roof as well. The photos section of the site has always been very successful and it continues to be so. Each day, 300 million photos are uploaded to Facebook, that's orders of magnitude more than any other photo sharing service on the web.