With 1 billion daily active users, Facebook's (FB +0.00%) growth is reaching double digits each year.
In this video segment, analysts Sean O'Reilly and Dylan Lewis discuss what that means, as well as the company's massive investment in manpower. Over the past 12 months, the social media company has almost doubled its employee count. And as Facebook attempts to eliminate embedded links for YouTube videos, the company anticipates that video streams will continue to grow as well.
Listen to the full podcast by clicking here. A transcript follows the video.
Sean O'Reilly: Dylan, I know you dug into the report and pulled some cool stats for us. How many people are on Facebook? Are they still stalking me and trying to sell me T-shirts? What else can you tell me?
Dylan Lewis: They will never stop stalking you and try to sell you T-shirts. The constant will be stalking you and trying to sell you T-shirts.
O'Reilly: Until I buy one.
Lewis: Yes. One of the other headline numbers that people like to look at in terms of growth and things like that is monthly active users and daily active users. Facebook reported 1.55 billion monthly active users, which is up 14% year over year.
O'Reilly: What's the population of mankind? Is it just over 8?
Lewis: I think we're around 7, but I could be wrong. That's one of those stats that I haven't had to know in a while.
O'Reilly: I don't know. That's a big chunk of our species either way.
Lewis: That's 14% year over year, 3.6% sequentially, and 1 billion daily active users, up 16.5% year over year, and 4% sequentially.
O'Reilly: You were right. July 2015, 7.3 billion. 1.55 divided by 7.3.
Lewis: I'll meet you in the middle.
O'Reilly: 21% of the human population is on Facebook.
Lewis: That's pretty incredible. You think about the number of people that actually have access to Internet, I think it's somewhere closer to 3 billion.
O'Reilly: Half of Internet users.
Lewis: Both of those numbers are great to see. You think about how growth rates work and the denominator getting larger and larger and they're still posting pretty impressive growth. Especially when you compare them to some of the other social media outlets like Twitter, which is posting relatively similar growth despite being a much smaller denominator. Another nice thing that they highlighted was 8 billion daily video views on Facebook.
O'Reilly: Whoa. I went to YouTube for the Star Wars trailer the other day.
Lewis: One of the things that we'll continue to see with them is hosted content and moving away from having embedded YouTube links. The analysts asked a little bit about their content aims and I think it was much more oriented on what we're seeing in terms of length, but a lot of the execs noted that they're seeing a lot of folks like late night talk show hosts segmenting their shows into these very nice, digestible 1-3 minute clips.
It's something similar to what we do with our partners here, rather than posting full shows. That's what you see a bit more with YouTube. Again, just something to watch out for. Videos play incredibly well on the platform I expect that number to only go up in the coming quarters.
O'Reilly: The biggest growth number I'm seeing here is the number of employees. What's up with that?
Lewis: Yeah, it's pretty awesome. They're up to almost 12,000 employees, which is up 44% year over year. Continuing to invest in talent.
O'Reilly: I wonder what all these people are doing.
Lewis: I think at a certain point it's got to be sales staff, but that is just speculation.
O'Reilly: For all the ads and everything.
Lewis: On my part. One of the most impressive things was that Facebook has four properties with more monthly active users than TWTR.
