It seems ridiculous, but very soon Facebook will have at least 1 billion users worldwide. If you exclude all the spammer who make multiple accounts, that number might drop significantly, but its still a serious number. According to the folks at iCrossing, a digital agency, that might actually happen as soon as August 2012, based on current growth trends.
Using a process of linear regression on the data from the end of 2008 onwards we expect Facebook to hit a billion active users around August 2012. Looking at the data from 2006-mid 2008 it looks like Facebook was growing at an exponential rate, however more recent data suggests it’s growing in a linear fashion.
Facebook’s growth has slowed or stopped in many of its early adopting countries such as the US and the UK. However, developing countries such as India and Brazil have shown strong growth with India growing from 22million users to 36 million and Brazil going from 13 million to 30 million in the last 9 months. Both are large countries with millions of potential users who have yet to sign up to Facebook, with only 3% of India’s population on Facebook and 16% of Brazil’s (compared to 49% of America’s population or 47% of the UK’s population) countries such as these will clearly contribute heavily to Facebook’s continued growth.
I guess the real question is, how valuable are those users in today’s market, where users are finicky and move from one trend to another. A report by The Telegraph claims that an IPO would value those users at as much as $125 per users, as based on November of 2011.
The company is expected to file for the IPO before the end of the year, in a move which would place a value of around US$125 (£80) on each of its 800 million users.The $100 billion valuation would be twice as high as it was in January, when the company announced a $1.5 billion investment from Goldman Sachs Group and other backers.At $10 billion, the offering would raise more money than any other technology IPO – dwarfing the previous record holder, Infineon Technologies AG, which generated $5.23 billion in an IPO in 2000. Facebook expects to be required by U.S. regulators to disclose financial results by April 30, 2012, if it doesn’t go public by then, the company said in January.
That seems like a ridiculous amount since most studies show that the average Facebook user never converts for anything. Still, with almost 1 Billion users, how much is user really worth in the global and internet marketplace?
Crush the Competition with CrushAds
http://www.crushads.com
