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Facebook has reached 2 billion regular users, a registered Facebook user who logged in and visited Facebook through its website or a mobile device, or used its Messenger app, in the past 30 days.
Describing it as another milestone in its growth from a college curiosity to the world’s largest social media network, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg disclosed the number on a Facebook post. “It’s an honor to be on this journey with you,” he wrote.
The member base is bigger than the population of any single country and of six of the seven continents and it constitutes more than a quarter of the world’s 7.5 billion people, said the company.
The figures for May have also taken into consideration the duplicate accounts, according to an estimate from last year, representing about 6 percent of its worldwide user base. Its nearest rival Twitter has about 328 million as of April and Snapchat has 166 million daily users at the end of the first quarter of 2017. WeChat, a widely used service in China, had 938 million monthly active users in the first quarter of this year.
Facebook had 1.94 billion people as of March 31, an increase of 17 percent from a year earlier. Facebook reached its first 1 billion mark in October 2012 and by now it could have doubled the number, compared to its first half.
Zuckerberg started Facebook in 2004 in his college dorm room, used its huge reach to get advertisers, offering them highly targeted marketing capabilities based on its data about users, sometimes ignoring privacy complaints in the US and elsewhere. It has about 5 million advertisers now.
Facebook’s growth has increasingly come from outside the United States, such as India, which is one of its major users. Three years ago, US, Canada and Europe accounted for 38 percent of users, compared with about 30 percent in the first quarter of this year, said a report.
Mike Nowak, Product Director and Guillermo Spiller, Product Manager of Facebook have on the occasion launched a personalized video to celebrate bringing the world closer together.
“This wouldn’t have happened without the millions of smaller communities and individuals who are sharing and making meaningful contributions every day. Each day, more than 175 million people share a Love reaction, and on average, over 800 million people like something on Facebook. More than 1 billion people use Groups every month.To show our appreciation for the many ways people support one another on Facebook, we will share several personalized experiences over the coming days,” they said in blog post.
