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Facebook exaggerates the amount of users

34 points by jpirkola ↗ HN
Finnish major newspaper hs.fi wrote: For advertisers Facebook claims to reach 700 000 Norwegians aged 18-24. There are only 420 000 Norwegians in that age group. Also claims to reach 562020 Helsinki area citizens - would cover 97% of the total area population.

24 comments

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swombat
Perhaps you should post a link to the article rather than your own extract. That would be vote-worthy...
markessien
The article is in Swedish. I doubt that would be voted up.
swombat
Even so, a link to the article within the body of the story would have lent some credibility to the posting.
pwim
A major Finnish newspaper writes articles in Swedish? I don't think so.
Kollner
The article is in Finnish, not Swedish.
csomar
lot of my friends (which are non coders) made more than one profile in facebook, may be it's the same situation
ecommercematt
Just in from Facebook: We will more accurately represent our user data in the future. This kind of exaggeration is Finnish.
kailashbadu
It could also mean that a number of facebook users are fond of lying their ages.
matthias
At a guess this would be largely explained by usage of facebook "networks" not mapping to population. For example, 1. choosing a nearby big city as your network when you live rurally or 2. setting your network as where you go to school.
TallGuyShort
I guess I'm not the only one trying to boost their "friend" count...
Tangurena
We had a discussion about this at work yesterday. The older folks (like 30+) tended to log on once, set up their page and never log back in. The youngest (19) had 3 pages - one had been abandoned due to stalkers, one was for her band, and one just for the folks she knew in 'real life.'

I don't have a facebook page, and I'm not going to get one just to play mafiawars with the guys at work.

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aristus
I did a probe of FB's population a couple of years ago. At the time they claimed to have 75 million users, they had less than 19 million "real" active profiles.
ryanwaggoner
How exactly did you determine that?
aristus
When they first opened up the search page it was refreshingly naive about data security.

My numbers may have been skewed downwards because not all profiles were indexed. But I cross-referenced Uni + Year searches with full dumps from Uni tabs and it matched up pretty well (ie, UPenn has X class of 2009 students in real life, search turns up 0.53 X, UPenn dump turns up 0.58 X).

Then again, not all users may have institutional affiliations. But around the same time FB launched ad targeting (http://www.facebook.com/ads/create/) which tells you how many people they can reach. When set to no filtering it returned 19.2 Million.

edit (removed QED): I just double-checked that page today. They are claiming 62M in US, 18M in UK, 11M in Canada, 8M in France, 2M in India, 2M in Hong Kong, 2M in Germany, etc. It's possible those numbers add up to 200M, but it's not clear whether they have changed their definition of user for the purposes of this app.

Tritis
And a lot of my friends list New York, NY as their city as well even though we live in NJ. Mostly people in theater or photography or some other vanity based work. I bet there are more than 2 million people listed as living in NY, NY too.
pj
It's amazing how many comments to this thread are trying to rationalize FB's claims when everyone knows they are bogus.
noodle
facebook's usage numbers stopped being realistic once they opened up to the public. it used to be kind of hard to get more than one .edu email address. now, even i have multiple facebook accounts (for testing apps). it is unrealistic for them to expect that 1 registered user = 1 physical person.
Zarathu
Whenever someone finds an SQL injection vulnerability, we'll know how many users are really on there.

Unless they do crazy shit with databases....

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