14 DAY TRIAL // There's little doubt that Facebook, despite already being one of the largest sites on the web, is still growing at a torrid pace. But just how much it has been growing lately and how many users it has at this point is harder to pinpoint. Some estimates though indicate that it may have already gotten past another milestone, 600 million users.
Facebook doesn't officially provide user numbers, except for the 500 million figure it revealed more than six months ago.
But it does provide some data indirectly, when creating new ads Facebook displays an estimate of the audience you can reach, depending on the country.
Adding up the numbers for all the countries Facebook's available in should provide an estimate of its current size, this, of course, depending on how accurate the Facebook data is in the first place.
Using this rather crude method, Socialbackers, a website dedicated to tracking Facebook stats, concluded that Facebook should be days away from reaching the 600 million users mark.
Much more interesting than the total figure though are the stats broken down by country. While the actual numbers may not be entirely accurate, the trends should be.
India, Russia and Brazil see huge growth in the past six months
For the past six months, the biggest growth happened in Facebook's biggest stronghold, and the place of its birth, the US. Here, 20.7 million new users joined Facebook in the past six months. The popular belief though is that there isn't that much more room to grow for the site in the US.
However, it is only starting to pick up Steam in other countries. The second biggest growing country was India where Facebook added 8.3 million new users. Considering that it has only recently managed to overtake Google's Orkut in the country, the next six months should be more of the same.
Other places in Asia are seeing similar big growth, notably Indonesia and the Philippines with 8 million new users and 6.2 million respectively. Again, these are countries where, for a long time, Facebook was not the most popular social network.
This trend is mirrored in other countries where Facebook has been struggling. The social network saw a 50 percent rise in users in Germany, reaching 14.2 million users, 70 percent growth in Russia, for a total of 3.1 million users, and Poland where it doubled its user base, reaching 4.8 million.
Unsurprisingly, in none of those countries Facebook is the top dog in social networking, thought it looks like it's only a matter of time. Another place where Facebook doubled its reach is Brazil, the last place where Orkut is the top social network.