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Facebook Passes 250 Million Users

Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO and Founder of Facebook, announced about a week ago that the social networking site now has over 250 million users. Just a few months ago, back in April of 2009, Facebook passed 200 million users. The growth of the site is pretty phenomenal and reinforces the fact that Facebook is the #1 social networking site in the world, although in the U.S. MySpace still holds a slight advantage. In the global market however, Facebook is more than twice the size of MySpace and continues to dominate in every category.

To give you an idea of Facebook’s adoption, the U.S. has a population of just over 300 million, and the world has about 6.7 billion people. That means in the U.S., with over 75 million users, 1 in 4 people have a Facebook page, with about half of those logging in each day. Worldwide, Facebook reaches about 4% of the popluation. You can see more Facebook statistics here.

One of the most interesting things about the growth of Facebook was not the fact that it had so many global users, but instead that those aged 35 and up were the fastest growing population of users and responsible for fueling much of the recent gains. That means the older population is embracing Facebook as a networking tool for business beyond simple social connections, which is definitely not the case for MySpace.

The demise of MySpace has been well documented in the media, with falling user statistics and a much smaller global reach. However, MySpace commands a much larger advertising revenue share (over twice that of Facebook) and also has been very successful in the music field. I wouldn’t count MySpace out of the race, but I think it’s time to reconsider the direction they’re going if they ever want to regain their audience.

On a personal note, I no longer have a MySpace page, although I’ve never been too big into social networking. However, being a web designer and developer, the real reason MySpace lost its appeal to me was the cluttered, loud, annoying user profile pages that greeted me every time I’d visit a friend’s page. No thanks.

Do you still have a MySpace page? What are your thoughts on Facebook’s growth and MySpace’s fall?