2 000 , , FACEBOOK’S HUGE MILESTONE 000, 000
But reaching the next billion may be its biggest challenge yet
It’s the biggest status update ever from Mark Zuckerberg: 2 billion people — more than a quarter of the world’s population — hang out on Facebook at least once amonth.
The milestone Zuckerberg announced Tuesday is all the more remarkable because no other Internet company has ever reached it. If Facebook were a country, it would be the most populous.
“As of this morning, the Facebook community is now officially 2 billion people!” he said in a Facebook post announcing the milestone. “It’s an honor to be on this journey with you.”
Yet in an interview at his company’s Silicon Valley headquarters, the Facebook CEO downplayed the significance of reaching 2 billion users, instead focusing on what the giant social network has yet to accomplish: wiring the entire planet.
“What we really care about is being able to connect everyone. So 2 billion, there wasn’t as much fanfare around it,” he said. “We still haven’t connected everyone.”
Zuckerberg is faced with a daunting challenge: how to keep growing when a huge chunk of people already use Facebook. The next billion will be a lot tougher to wrangle than the first two because not everyone in the world has an Internet connection and a few parts of the world are off limits to Facebook.
“The first billion is easy. The second billion is somewhat harder. Getting past that is going to be even more of a challenge,” said eMarketer analyst Debra Aho Williamson. “Part of it is the law of large numbers, and part of it is that there are still places in the world where Facebook is blocked or people don’t have access to the Internet to get on Facebook.”
About two- thirds of the world’s population are not on the Internet. Around 15% of people live in remote regions that have no access. In other places, people have Internet access but can’t afford it, or they have simple feature phones or cheap
smartphones with spotty connections.
Of the 3 billion people who are on the Internet, about 700 million are in China. Facebook is trying to set the stage for a return to China, where it has been blocked since 2009. Another challenge: In some places, Facebook hasn’t managed to wrest a majority of users from local social networks.
“I do think these are large shifts that are good moments to reflect on what our responsibility is in the world and what things we can uniquely do,” Zuckerberg told USA TODAY of hitting the 2 billion user mark.
Recognizing the difficulty ahead, last week Facebook changed its mission statement for the first time. After a decade of promoting Facebook as a service that connects small groups of friends and family, Facebook is broadening its focus for the next decade to “give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.”
Facebook reached 1 billion users in September 2012, which Zuckerberg describes as “the single milestone that I am most proud of for the company, much more than any business metric or anything like that.”
“For so long, we were rallying around serving a billion people, and getting to a billion people is sort of this moment,” he told USA TODAY.
“But 1 billion wasn’t really the goal. It was a proxy because it was a very big round number.”
What has been remarkable to Jan Dawson, chief analyst with Jackdaw Research, is how Facebook has been able to accelerate growth in areas outside North America and Europe even as barriers increase. Dawson told USA TODAY in February that Facebook was on track to hit 2 billion users by late June.
Over the past five years, the developing world has boosted Facebook’s growth as the company made its mobile app easier to use on rudimentary Android smartphones and in places where bandwidth is low, adding 746million users in Asia and a region it calls “Rest Of World” since hitting 1 billion users.
Still, data has to be cheap enough that people in developing countries can afford it. Technology has to be built that works where there is low or no bandwidth. And Facebook has to give these areas a compelling reason to go online.