Monday, October 3, 2011

Time spent on Facebook


Hi all, I was looking at a few old text files I authored just now and came across 'Facebook Timewaster.txt' - In the past I used to write about things and post them on forums online, or on Facebook as notes...sometimes I used to just write them out and send them to people I knew because I thought they might be interested to read what I had created.

This file was created on April 29th 2011 and gives a source...which is now out of date, as it no longer gives the figure - But I assure you at the time of creation it was given, and I recorded it accurately.

Anyhow the information is about how much time is spent on Facebook in a month, I did some calculations (if you notice an error I'm happy to have it pointed out).

Enjoy.

"People spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook"

Source: http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics

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60 minutes * 24 hours of a day

= 1,440 minutes

1,440 minutes (one day)

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700,000,000,000 minutes (Spent on Facebook) / 31 days (longest month used)

= 22,580,645,161 minutes (spent every day on Facebook)

/

1,440 minutes of a day

= 15,681,003 days spent a day on Facebook

/

36,600 days (100 Earth leap years)

= 428 (100 year lifespans where every year was a 366 day leap year)

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I still think that although that much time is spent logged into Facebook, it doesn't represent the reality, as their is no indication of things like how much of that time users are logged in represents idle time...or any suggestion as to how many 'real' accounts exist (i.e. One could be logged into multiple accounts at the same time).

TODAY, October 4, 2011 Facebook's statistics page boasts that there are "More than 800 million active users" and that "More than 50% of our active users log into Facebook in any given day".

I want to crunch some more numbers (I have a problem :P)

Using a figure of 50% of the active users logging in for say, today...and using a flat figure of 800 million users we could assume 400 million users will log in. There ARE 31 days in this month so we'll use the (dated) figure of daily minutes spent calculated above of 22,580,645,161 minutes and we'll average it out across those 400 million users; giving us the result of each of the 400mil users spending ~56.5 minutes on Facebook.

I don't know about you but the thought of 400 million people (big assumption) spending just under 1/24 (4.16%) of their day on Facebook boggles my mind...

3 comments:

  1. I would say that it does mine, but most of that time is spent trying to figure out the point of being on facebook. Then trying to figure out the new, new privacy settings. It's daunting man.

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  2. It doesn't boggle my mind much, but I do think "Our users spend an average of one hour a day here!" sounds a LOT less impressive than "We have 800 million users and half of those will sign in on any given day".

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  3. Wow. That's amazing. I like Facebook but man we spend way too much time on that website in general.

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