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Facebook founder Mark [...]
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Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg says his site is growing by one million users a week in the U.S., according to an interview he did with MSNBC’s Today Show published this morning. The show’s host, Matt Lauer, adds that it’s growing by more than 5 million users a week worldwide. This is strikingly fast growth even compared to the company’s most recently published numbers.
But what about making money from all those users? Zuckerberg claims that a “few different lines” of revenue are growing “very quickly,” and that he’s especially happy with how that effort is going in this economy.
But what about microblogging site Twitter, rival social network MySpace (which is still larger in the U.S.) and other services? He says Facebook is differentiating itself through things like easy photo-sharing (it has more than a billion photos shared per month) and privacy controls so people can make sure those who are most special in their lives can see certain information. In a further illustration of that point, The Economist recently published an article quoting a Facebook “in-house sociologist” who said the average user spends most of their time communicating with only a handful of close friends.
Also of note: Zuckerberg admits he didn’t foresee his company being one of the main ways that people share information on the web, back when he started the site in 2004 — just that there would be services to help people to do so.
Lastly, I should point out that the interview also rehashes a bunch of the recent news about the company’s changes to its terms of service (our previous coverage first here, then here and mostly recently here).
Update: A quick look at AllFacebook’s demographic data about the site — drawn from Facebook’s advertiser reporting tools — corresponds to the U.S. growth rate that Zuckerberg indicates (and in fact suggests its growing even faster).