Category — Facebook

How big is Facebook? With nearly 400 million members on board, the company is a pretty big subset of the internet. With such a massive audience, the revenues from behavioral targeting, social gaming, partnerships can bring a lot of revenues. According to a study by Inside Facebook, the social network could have well made over $600 million in 2009 and can make close to $1.1 billion in 2010.

Estimates for 2009
Brand advertising : $225 million
Microsoft ads : $50 million
Virtual goods (Credits) : $10 million
Performance advertising : $350 million

Facebook now has over 350 million users. With such a huge crowd, where are the people coming from? Here are the top countries whose people have been fueling Facebook’s growth. Note that this list was picked from another list of the top ten countries by user growth numbers. So, there possibly could be other countries who are in the top ten but did not grow enough in volumes (though that sounds unlikely)

1. USA : 102.6 million
2. Turkey : 16.9 million
3. Indonesia : 15.3 million
4. Italy : 13.5 million
5. Philippines : 8.8 million
6. Spain : 7.8 million
7. Argentina : 7.5 million
8. Mexico : 6.6 million
9. India : 5.6 million
10. Malaysia : 4.2 million

It is no news that Facebook has been increasing in its popularity over the past few years, something that explains the terrific rise in the user base of the social network. Anderson Analytics has been tracking the rise in the popularity of Facebook as the favorite site among US College students. Here is the percent of respondents to whom Facebook was a favorite

2005 : 8.2%
2006 : 11.6%
2007 : 12.2%
2008 : 15.7%
2009 : 27.4%

Facebook does not ask for your race. But a recent study used the US Census data to predict the race of users from their surnames. For instance, a person with a surname Washington was 89% likely to be black.

Based on this study, here’s the race based split up of Facebook’s 100 million American users

White : 74%
Blacks : 11%
Latino : 9%
Asian : 6%

There has been so many debates in the past whether Twitter can be a Facebook-killer. Here is a stat that makes all the discussion futile. Forget Facebook, the Facebook app Farmville is bigger than Twitter. By miles.

Here are the top ten Facebook apps and their monthly unique visitors. For the record, Twitter has around 18 million uniques.

1. FarmVille : 69.2 million
2. Causes : 33.9 million
3. Cafe World : 30.8 million
4. Happy Aquarium : 27.4 million
5. Mafia Wars : 26.8 million
6. Fishville : 21.8 million
7. Pet Society : 21.5 million
8. Texas HoldEm Poker : 19.8 million
9. YoVille : 19.1 million
10. Facebook for iPhone : 18.7 million