14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook may not like all of the companies and reports trying to guess how many users it had, but it seems that the reports were rather spot on. The site is getting close to 750 million users, a source close to the company said. However, Facebook likely won't be announcing the milestone publicly, the latest official number is still 500 million, from last year.
But TechCrunch reports that the latest numbers coming from inside Facebook are 750 million active users, a decent jump in just one year, but nothing in the likes of what Facebook saw a couple of years ago.
Of course, with the site nearing saturation in many of the countries that it was the most popular first, growth is fueled largely by developing countries and emerging markets.
Facebook is growing very fast in these countries as well, but overall the rise is slower. That is not to say it's stopping, most likely, Facebook will hit one billion users not so far into the future, next year by current growth rates, even without tapping into the Chinese market.
Facebook is said to have had some talks with Baidu and is said to be thinking about how to enter China, either with a local product or a different but interconnected version.
If it manages that and if it manages to be successful in the notoriously fickle Chinese market, it will grow way beyond one billion users in the coming years.
In the meantime, there doesn't seem to be any plans of revealing this milestone, at this point it's looking like Facebook is only going to update its official user count when it reaches one billion.
Interestingly, third-party tools peg Facebook user numbers at around 700 million, based on the numbers it releases itself for advertisers. Earlier this month, Facebook disputed those numbers and it now looks like they may actually be under-representing its user base.