It’s time for some fun facts about Facebook. No matter where you are, you should already be familiar with Facebook. This is the largest social networking site in the universe. And, it is gaining more and more popularity over time. So it’s just obvious we will want to explore some of the most fascinating facts we can find about Facebook in this post. If you are looking for some interesting facts about the social network, then keep on reading the rest of the post to know more.
Even though Facebook wasn’t the first social network site online, it is obvious by now that there is no other, I mean sure, Twitter is a thing and Pinterest but it just can’t compare to the volume and popularity that this company was able to achieve.
So if you have a Facebook user ( Sure you do ), this list of some fun facts about Facebook will surly entertain you for a few minutes.
25 Fun Facts about Facebook
#1 History of Facebook
We all know that the CEO and founder of Facebook is Mark Zuckerberg. He developed a website named ‘Facemash’ back in 2003 when he was a 2nd-year student at Harvard. But that was not a social networking site at the moment.
Due to the popularity of ‘Facemash’, Mark Zuckerberg and some of his college roommates including Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, Andrew McCollum, and more started to develop this site further with various new features. Later, on February 04, 2004, they have launched a new social networking site named ‘TheFacebook’ revamping ‘Facemash’. This was an instant hit.
As a result, the co-founders of Facebook started to expand its service gradually. In 2005, they acquired a new domain name that is ‘facebook.com’ and changed the name from ‘TheFacebook’ to ‘Facebook’. By the time it was December 2005, this social networking site had over 6 million users already.
#2 Facebook Monthly Active Users
We all know that Facebook is the biggest social networking site in the world. But how big is it? Interestingly, Facebook has about 2.5 billion active monthly users from all around the world as of December 2019. Unbelievable, isn’t it?
#3 Facebook Fake Accounts
Facebook has faced a lot of issues regarding fake accounts. Primarily, Facebook said that about 3 to 4 percent of their total active users are fake. But later, Facebook reported that they have identified about 3 billion fake accounts from 2018 to 2019.
Additionally, they also stated that they have removed about 2.8 billion fake Facebook account within a year. That means Facebook had to remove about 7.7 million fake accounts per day on average.
#4 Price of Facebook Domain Names
To drop the ‘The’ from the name ‘TheFacebook’, the company acquired a new domain name from the ‘AboutFace Corporation’ in 2005. FB has paid about 200,000 USD for the ‘Facebook.com’ domain name.
Later on 15th November 2010, the company announced that the users could access Facebook using a new domain name that is ‘Fb.com’. That meant that they have purchased the new domain name but they haven’t disclosed the amount they had to pay for this.
At that point, that domain name belonged to the ‘American Farm Bureau Federation’. Later, the ‘American Farm Bureau Federation’ disclosed that the price of the ‘Fb.com’ domain name was about 8.5 million USD. Let that sink in!
#5 Facebook Data Storage Capacity
There are reports that FB has about 300 Petabytes of data on their data centers that include everything from your profile information to photos, and messages. For your information, 1 Petabyte equals to 1 million Gigabytes.
For comparison, if you could store every written work of humankind from the beginning of the recorded history, you would need only 50 Petabytes of storage capacity.
#6 When FB Goes Down
Giant sites like Facebook or YouTube doesn’t go down often. Still, there are times when even Facebook goes down. As a user, you might feel frustrated in those instances that you cannot access your favorite social networking sites. But, this is actually far worse for Facebook itself.
Reports say that Facebook loses about 30,000 USD per minute if the site is down. When Facebook was down for over 19 minutes back in 2014, they lost about 429,000 USD in that period.
#7 Most Downloaded App on Mobile Platform
If you browse Facebook using your phone, then you must do that through the Facebook app. As a result, most of the FB users have installed Facebook on their phones. And, there are reports that Facebook was the most downloaded app of the decade.
It had over 4.6 billion downloads in that period. Interestingly, the list of the most downloaded apps of the decade belongs to the Facebook family, as WhatsApp, Facebook, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram took the top four places.
#8 Popular Companies Acquired By Facebook
Facebook has been expanding its business in different tech industries over the years. Due to that, they have purchased a lot of startups and established companies at the same time. For instance, they have acquired Instagram back in 2012 for 1 billion USD.
Later in 2014, they have purchased ‘WhatsApp’ for about 19 billion USD. Additionally, they have also acquired Oculus VR, LiveRail, FriendFeed, etc. Till now, Facebook has reportedly acquired about 82 companies from around the world.
#9 Facebook & Internet.org
Facebook and other 6 companies made a partnership to make internet services affordable (even free) to some selected countries. The mission was initiated back on 20th August 2013.
It is reported that over 50 million people all over the world have been using the internet.org service. The service is available in about 24 countries at the moment. And, you can visit about 27 websites for free (or for a minimal fee) using this service.
#10 Multilingual Facebook
Facebook is a multilingual website. At first, it was only available in English. But gradually, Facebook rolled down support for various languages. At the moment of writing this post, Facebook is available in 140 languages.
#11 Facebook’s Revenue and Net Income
Facebook’s revenue has been increasing every year. For instance, the total revenue of Facebook in 2018 was about 55.8 billion USD. But in 2019, the revenue of Facebook was about 70.7 billion USD. The net income of Facebook in 2018 was about 22 billion USD. But in 2019, Facebook’s net income was about 18.48 billion USD.
#12 Facebook’s Value
Like its revenue, the value of the company is also increasing. For example, it is reported that the company value was about 42 billion USD back in 2010.
However, right now, it is estimated that the net worth of Facebook is about 150 billion USD. But in terms of market capitalization, the company is worth about 607.54 billion USD at the time of writing this post.
#13 Most Popular Profile, Page, and more on Facebook
The most liked page on Facebook is none other than its own page. At the time of writing, the ‘Facebook’ page has over 214 million followers. Next in line is the page of Samsung with a following of about 159 million followers.
The 3rd on the list is the page of the famous footballer (soccer player) Cristiano Ronaldo. His page has about 122 million followers. Mark Zuckerberg’s page is on the 4th place with about 116 million followers. And, the 5th place is taken by the page of the ‘Real Madrid C.F.’ football (soccer) club that has about 110 million followers.
#14 Cool Facts about Facebook
Every second, there are about 4080 photos are uploaded on Facebook. That means, about 245,000 photos are uploaded each minute in FB. On average, 1 million friend requests are sent in each minute.
Also, Facebook gets about 100 million hours of video watch time every day on average. Till now, the ‘Like’ reaction has been used over 1.15 trillion times.
#15 How Facebook Makes Money
Like most other sites, Facebook also makes its money from advertising primarily. However, they also earn some of their revenue from different payments and other fees. According to Facebook’s reports, 98.5% of the total revenue of the company came from advertising in 2018.
However, as it has to compete with some other big companies like Google, Apple, Amazon, etc. for the advertising space, the growth of revenue from advertising is slowing down a bit recently.
#16 Facebook Ad Engagement
At the moment, FB has over 7 million advertisers. Reportedly, Facebook can reach up to 1.9 billion users using their advertising service. Instagram accounts for 20 percent of Facebook Inc.’s mobile ad revenue.
Also, images are responsible for about 75 to 90 percent of FB advertising engagement. At the moment, Facebook has about 19.7% of the total share of the entire digital advertising market worldwide.
#17 Facebook is Banned in Several Countries
Facebook has been banned in many countries both temporarily and permanently. However, Facebook is permanently banned in China, Syria, North Korea, and Iran.
#18 Get Reward from Facebook
If you could find any bugs in any of Facebook’s programs or products, you can actually make some money with this. Facebook has a program named ‘Facebook Bug Bounty Program’. According to this program, the company pays at least 500 USD if anyone reports any security holes to Facebook.
#19 Highest Number of Facebook Users
As a country, India has the most Facebook users in the world. At the moment, there are about 270 million users use Facebook in India. After that, the second place goes to the USA with over 190 million users of Facebook.
#20 Criticism against Facebook
Although Facebook is a popular social networking site, it has faced a lot of criticisms in recent years. It was criticized for retaining excessive user information, violating users’ privacy, sharing/selling private data of users to other companies, etc.
Researches also showed that Facebook has negative psychological impacts on the user base. Facebook also faces backlash over controversial and fake news issues.
#21 Privacy on Facebook
Facebook has been criticized for a long time for breaching the privacy of the users. At times, the company would refuse any of the claims against them. However, in 2018, a number of reports showed that Cambridge Analytica —a political consulting firm— illegally accessed personal data of millions of users.
They used the data of many American voters to influence them to support a particular party during the United States presidential election.
#22 Facebook UI:
You will notice that the Facebook website and the app’s primary color is blue. Is there any particular reason for that? Yes, there is! Mark Zuckerberg —the founder of Facebook—is a red-green colorblind. That is why he can see the blue color the best.
In an interview with The New Yorker, he said that ‘Blue is the richest color for me’. And, that is the reason why the blue color dominates both the Facebook app and website.
#23 Technical Aspects of Facebook
Primarily, FB is built in PHP and it is compiled with HipHop for PHP (a transpiler developed by Facebook). This transpiler is used to transform PHP into C++. The inclusion of HipHop for PHP transpiler has reduced the average CPU consumption on the servers of FB by 50%.
#24 Create Nice Looking Posts on Facebook
Tired of posting boring texts as your status update on Facebook? Luckily, there are a number of sites available where you can create fancy and unique looking posts for Facebook.
Just visit these sites and enter or paste the text you want to share on FB. Then the normal text will be converted into many unique fonts automatically. You can then copy them directly and paste them to your FB profile.
#25 Download What Facebook Knows About You
Like it or not, Facebook actually knows a lot about you. After a lot of criticism and confrontation, Facebook now allows users to download and see what information Facebook has about you on their collection.
So, if you are concerned about the things FB knows about you, you can download all the information from your Facebook profile. Here’s how to do it…
- Visit FB.com or Facebook.com from your PC
- Next, log in to your Facebook account using the required credentials
- Now, click on the ‘Down arrow’ button from the top right corner of the screen
- In doing so, a dropdown menu will appear. Now, click on the ‘Settings’ option from there
- Then, the ‘General Account Settings’ page will appear
- From that page, you have to click on the ‘Download a copy of your Facebook data’ from the bottom of the page
- Now, click on the ‘Download Archive’ button from the next page
- It will prompt you for entering your FB password. So, enter the password in the popup box
- From that moment, Facebook will start to prepare the data to download. It will take a few minutes or so
- You can wait for that as Facebook will let you know by a message to your FB account inbox or an email to the email that is associated with your FB account
- So, click the download link and a zip file will start to download on your PC
- Just open the zip file and you will find lots of folders that contain all the information of your profile that Facebook knows about you
Summing it Up
Facebook has become a part and parcel of our daily life. Thus, many of us are pretty curious about this social media giant. To keep you updated about Facebook, we have collated all these incredible fun facts about Facebook in one post.
We hope you have learned a few new things about FB from our post. And, if you have liked the post, you can also read some facts about Samsung here.
So, do you like using Facebook? What do you think about Facebook, overall? You can share your opinion in the comments below!
