Facebook Usage Hits 16 Billion Minutes a Day

1sockchuck writes "Facebook's 400 million users spend more than 16 billion minutes on the site every day, and view 1 million photos every second. That's prompted massive growth in the social network's infrastructure, which now encompasses more than 60,000 servers. Facebook's Tom Cook discussed how the company's operations team manages that growth in a presentation last week at the O"Reilly Velocity conference (video). The next day at Structure 2010, Facebook Vice President of Operations Jonathan Heiliger said server and chip makers have 'come a long way' in supporting cloud platforms since he bashed them last year."

facebook no more

[stanlyb]

I have a Facebook account only to be in touch with some friends of mine......and the only "activity" that i see on my page is some smallville, zoo-ville or whatever-ville game post/request. Thank you, but no thank you. I am considering closing my account sooner than later, and i suppose there are a lot other people intending to do same.

Re:No we don't.

[aldld]

Well, I know a lot of non-geeks who often open up a browser window, go to Facebook (or some other sites), and when they go do something else leave the window and don't bother closing it. Eventually they forget about it and they end up having Facebook open for hours, or sometimes even days.

FB == 40 minutes/day, Slashdot == ???

[southpolesammy]

Dare we ask how much time the average Slashdot user spends here per day?

Re:What a waste...

[ninjacheeseburger]

16 billion / 400 million = 40 minutes per person?
That's a lot of farm-ville.
I probably spend 3-5 mins checking if I have any messages or events, and then quickly scroll down to see if anything important is going on.

Re:No we don't.

[Andy Dodd]

I just had a comment from a coworker that I always seemed to be online. I replied that I used Facebook's XMPP support and was logged in to it from an IM client, even when I wasn't actually at the computer. (My home computer has Pidgin running almost constantly.)

In addition to that, my home machine usually has Facebook open in a tab in Firefox. Facebook and GMail are pretty much my "always open even when out of the house" tabs.

Re:No we don't.

[IsoRashi]

I'm not sure I really understand your post. It seems like you think the numbers are inflated because some people are "on" facebook 24/7 but not actively using the site all the time. Yet 16 billion minutes among 400 million users is only 40 minutes per user. That doesn't sound too preposterous to me.

Re:wow...

[wvmarle]

That would be 40 minutes per user per day.

I think it is quite reasonable to assume that half of the registered users is not using the site at all - maybe more - people lose interest, sign up for a one-time must see page, whatever. And unused accounts are not deleted of course. I am one of the less active users; I have an account and spend maybe five minutes a week on Facebook, if that much.

So that would mean that every active user would spend almost 1 1/2 hours per day surfing that site. On average. Which falls for me in the "bullshit" category. Just totally unbelievable. I don't even waste that much time on slashdot.

Viewing a million photos per second is more believable. I just opened my own Facebook page and found over 30 photos in the "news feed" alone. And I bet they count them all, thumbnails included. So take that as average: 30 photos on a page. And for an active Facebook browser one page every 15 seconds on average, I doubt they linger much. That is two photos a second they are "viewing". That requires 500,000 users online on average to reach that 1 mln photos a second.

Now take that back to the time spent online: 1440 minutes in a day; 500,000 out of 400 mln actually online, that makes an average of 1.8 minutes per registered user per day to get to the required half million users online at any one moment. Hey that sounds much more reasonable to me already. And that would give me a total of a mere 720 mln minutes wasted per day on Facebook. That's a whopping two orders of magnitude off of the claimed 16 bln. My numbers may be guesstimates but I can't imagine I'm two orders of magnitude off.

Now to think of the amount of time I wasted on this posting...

Re:wow...

[RavenChild]

I work in a computer lab on my university campus. I sit in the lab for 3-5 hours a few days a week. With this kind of time, I have noticed many people come in and read/post on facebook for at least an hour every day (I have seen people using facebook for my entire shifts).

When I notice a line starting for computers, I go around and ask the people I noticed spending too much time on facebook to let those in line have a chance. I always do this politely but even though they have spent an hour or two on facebook, I am always met with a look of disgust. Some of those people have even started yelling at me and others I've had to call campus police to escort out. It really seems as if many people have a mental addiction to social networks like facebook. They fear that they will miss something important if they aren't watching the news feed 24/7.

Those are the type of people that I see when I'm working the lab that lead me to believe these statistics just a bit. 16 billion seems too big but I can believe at least 3-5 billion minutes are spent on facebook a day just from the people I see in the labs.

Now something I do agree with you with respect to the pictures viewed is that facebook may also be counting the time people are logged into the facebook chat or just have a facebook window open. I know I leave firefox open all the time with facebook somewhere in my assortment of tabs.

Facebook moving into junk food

[Animats]

There are now YoVille gummi bears and brownies. There's a Mafia Wars Slurpee. Farmville ice cream. At your nearby 7-11 now. Really. Each comes with a Secret Code which, when typed into the game, unlocks some game item.

You have to admire Facebook from scaling up from a college photo book. It's also impressive that they can actually make their back end systems work, once you realize what's going on in there.