Facebook reaches one billion monthly active users

Reuters: Social media company Facebook Inc said on Thursday it reached the one billion active monthly users threshold last month, and is up more than 50 million users since June.

Facebook, based in Menlo Park, California, hit the one billion milestone on 14 September at 12:45 p.m. Pacific time, the company said on its website. It added that it had 600 million mobile users, according to a fact sheet posted on its website

The one billion user count is up from the end of June, when it had 955 million active monthly users. The company also said it has seen 1.13 trillion “likes,” or endorsements by users, since the company launched the feature in February 2009. Many of the ad campaigns that companies conduct on Facebook are designed to garner likes. It said 219 billion photos were uploaded as of September. Excluding deleted photos, about 265 billion photos have been uploaded since 2005.

About 17 billion location-tagged posts were made on the website, Facebook said, and 62.6 million songs have been played 22 billion times since September 2011.

The median age of a Facebook user was 22, it said, and the top five user countries were Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico and the United States.

The new data came a day after the company said it was letting US users pay a fee to boost the visibility of their postings – its latest effort to look beyond advertising for revenue.

Advertising accounted for roughly 84 per cent of the total revenue in the second quarter.

With Facebook’s revenue growth rate slowing sharply in recent quarters, analysts and investors believe it needs to find new ways to make money.

Shares of Facebook rose 2.1 per cent to $ 22.27 in premarket trading on Thursday. The stock made its public debut at $ 38 in May.