Facebook has revealed that 128 million US users and 24 million UK users log onto the social network each day, as the firm begins revealing regional audience figures for the first time in a bid to appeal to more advertisers. By comparison with TV audiences, just 6 million people tuned in to watch the mid-season […]
Facebook has revealed that 128 million US users and 24 million UK users log onto the social network each day, as the firm begins revealing regional audience figures for the first time in a bid to appeal to more advertisers.
By comparison with TV audiences, just 6 million people tuned in to watch the mid-season premiere of drama series “Breaking Bad” on Sunday in the US.
Typically, the ad industry and analysts have focused on monthly active users, which counts the number of people who visit at least once a month. But Facebook says that daily use is a better measure of its value to advertisers.
In a statement, Facebook said: “We are doing this because we believe brands and businesses should think differently about how people engage with Facebook, especially on mobile. A lot of people focus on monthly active users or even registered users to demonstrate their size and scale. We think this is becoming on old way of looking at the media world. In this world, understanding who comes back at least once a month is only part of the picture. Instead, businesses should focus on people who come back online every single day.”
With the social network set to launch TV-style commercials, the company’s focus is now on getting more users and provide more transparency to advertisers. In July 2013 its total ad revenue was 1.6 billion dollars.
“We would like to be able to be explicit and say this is the amount of people you can reach tomorrow, or the amount of people you can reach when you are launching a movie,” said Carolyn Everson, Facebook vice president of global marketing solutions.
Everson said that the question is about how the advertisers can reach the site’s more than a billion users and target them so as advertisers want to limit the amount of ‘waste’ spent on trying to reach the right consumer.
Television still has the greatest share of ad money spent in the US at 39%, according to eMarketer research, which estimated that $66.3m would be spent on TV this year. Digital advertising represents about 25% of 2013 estimated advertising spend at $42m.
UK market share- no ‘Facebook fatigue’?
The new figures from Facebook also aim to tackle what is termed “misinformation” from third-party data sources that has suggested many of the social network’s users were suffering “Facebook fatigue”.
The UK figures from Facebook show that more than a third of the country’s entire population logged onto Facebook.
The majority (84 per cent) – of those users, visit the site daily via their mobiles. Facebook has also today (14 August) broken out other country-by-country daily active user figures for June and revealed its UK monthly active user figure reached 33 million.
