19 Facebook Statistics That Are Hard to Believe

It’s been nearly 14 years since Mark Zuckerberg launched thefacebook.com, a small social network for Harvard students. The website quickly spread to Stanford, the other Ivies, and then the rest of U.S. colleges before taking on the world.

Today, Facebook (NASDAQ: FB) is one of the world’s biggest productivity sinks. Between Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp, people are spending a ridiculous amount of time on their phones. And I’m willing to bet it’s not all while they’re off the clock. There’s no doubt Facebook has a tremendous effect on our lives today.

Here are 19 Facebook statistics that are hard to believe.

2.07 billion people logged into Facebook in September. 1.37 billion of those logged in on an average day. What’s most astonishing about those numbers is that Facebook is continuing to add new users at a relatively rapid pace. Both its monthly and daily user counts were up 16% year over year. Monthly users are up 34% from just two years ago, while daily users climbed 36%. Most of Facebook’s new users are coming from Asia, which is now Facebook’s largest region by user count.

While everyone thought the price tag was crazy at the time, the investment has certainly paid off. Instagram has over 800 million monthly users today, 500 million of which open the app on a daily basis. What’s more, Instagram’s user growth has accelerated over the past 18 months. After adding 100 million every nine months like clockwork, it’s gone on to add more than 300 million new users in less than a year and a half. After introducing advertising in the app in 2014, Instagram is now Facebook’s second most important product after its flagship app.

ALSO READ: Instagram Will Be a $10 Billion Business by 2019

The growth of Facebook’s messaging apps is also hard to believe. WhatsApp was already a giant when Facebook acquired the company in 2014. It’s nearly tripled in size since then. Meanwhile, Messenger didn’t grow in popularity until Facebook stopped supporting the functionality in its main app. Management says the two apps serve distinct markets both geographically and in terms of how people use them. Still, it hasn’t quite figured out how to monetize those huge user bases. But with a couple billion users sending trillions of messages a year, there’s got to be some value for Facebook to unlock from the apps.

Instagram introduced Instagram Stories in August of 2016. The format is a direct copy of Snap’s (NYSE: SNAP) Snapchat’s Stories feature, and Facebook quickly copied the successful format from Instagram to its other apps. Today, both Instagram Stories and WhatsApp Status (the WhatsApp version of Stories) have 300 million daily users each. Users can also post Stories on Messenger or Facebook (the two are now tied to one another), and another 70 million users share photos and videos from their day there. For reference, Snapchat has just 178 million daily users as of the end of the third quarter.

Between Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger, global users are averaging nearly an hour per day staring at their phones. That number doesn’t even include WhatsApp, which is another monolith itself. Instagram says its users under 25 spend an average of 32 minutes per day in the app; those over 25 still spend 24 minutes per day in Instagram alone. Engagement is even higher in the U.S., where users spend an average of 41 minutes per day on Facebook and another 25 minutes on Instagram, according to eMarketer. It’s safe to say Facebook’s family of apps strategy is working.

Facebook deserves a spot on nearly everyone’s homescreen it’s used so often. Instagram is a close second, with six sessions per day. Both apps are particularly great at serving snacks of content throughout the day. That also means users are accessing the app at different times of the day throughout the day, providing a great opportunity for advertisers to reinforce their messages. No doubt Facebook points this out when convincing them to fork over millions of dollars.

ALSO READ: Facebook Wants to Reduce Engagement. Huh?

WhatsApp is the biggest messaging platform in the world in terms of engagement. The next closest competitor is WeChat, which sees an average of 38 billion messages per day. Back in 2016, Facebook said WhatsApp and Messenger users combined to send an average of 60 billion messages per day -- over three-times as many as SMS. It’s a good assumption the two combine for a lot more today.

India has one of the fastest growing internet populations in the world, and with a total population around four-times the size of the United States, it was only a matter of time before India overtook the U.S. as Facebook’s biggest market in terms of users. That happened last summer, when India reached an estimated 241 million users  -- just a hair over the estimated 240 million users in the United States. As an emerging market, there’s still a ton of revenue for Facebook to get out of those 241 million users in India compared to its U.S. users.

2017 was a year mired by “fake news” on Facebook. And to see why that’s such a big problem, just look at the fact that 45% of adults in the U.S. find news on Facebook, according to Pew Research. That’s more than any other social platform. Twitter (NYSE: TWTR), which prides itself on its ability to deliver news before the news rooms, is only a source for 11% of the country. Mark Zuckerberg vowed to improve the safety, security, and integrity of the Facebook platform going forward during the company’s third quarter earnings call.

Facebook has made incredible progress attracting small and medium-sized businesses. Of the 70 million businesses with Pages on Facebook, the vast majority of them are SMBs. There’s still a long way to go, though. There are around 500 million SMBs around the world, according to the International Labour Office. What’s more, Facebook is responsible for helping people start new businesses. Instagram says about one-third of the 25 million Business Profiles on its platform got their start on Instagram itself.

Not only has Facebook done a tremendous job of attracting businesses to its platforms with its free Pages and Business Profiles products, it’s been able to turn a lot of them into paying customers. The number of advertisers on Facebook continues to climb, with growth outpacing the organic growth in new Pages recently. Meanwhile, Facebook has managed to funnel a lot of the advertisers on its flagship platform onto Instagram, helping it grow a giant base of advertisers as well. Growth in advertisers is an important factor for investors going forward as Facebook relies more on demand to grow its ad revenue as it becomes supply-constrained.

ALSO READ: Facebook, Inc's Active Advertisers Are Soaring

Facebook has certainly seen higher average ad price increases in the past, but what makes this statistic so hard to believe is that it came at the same time as a 10% increase in ad impressions. The times Facebook reported higher average ad price increases than 35% corresponded with steep declines in ad impressions as it overhauled its ad formats. Facebook is relying on the steady growth of demand and continually improving the ROI its advertisers can generate in order to raise its ad prices.

Advertisers are shifting more and more of their budgets to digital as consumers watch less television, newspaper and magazine circulation declines, and digital music even cuts into (ad-supported) radio listening. Facebook has been the primary beneficiary of the shift. Not only did it take 35% of the digital display advertising market and 44% of the mobile display ad market in the U.S. in 2016, its biggest competitors actually lost market share while it took more. Facebook will bring in $21.6 billion in U.S. ad revenue this year, while newspaper advertising will bring in just $10.7 billion, according to eMarketer.

How much would you pay for an ad-free Facebook experience? $1 a month might cut it if you live in India or another emerging market in Asia, but if you live in the U.S. or Canada, you might be paying closer to $7 per month. Facebook generated $21.20 per user in the U.S. and Canada in the third quarter, and that number will go up in the seasonally-strong fourth quarter. The combination of high engagement and excellent targeting tools makes Facebook user monetization one of the best in the world.

Facebook introduced Marketplace in late 2016, and it’s quickly caught on with a subsection of Facebook users that use the app to find buyers or sellers for items. Facebook said U.S. users listed 18 million items last May, and that number is growing. Overall, 550 million users participated in Buy & Sell groups on Facebook. 18 million is just the start for Facebook. Craigslist boasts over 80 million listing per month, so that shows the potential for Facebook. Facebook is expanding the feature to more and more countries each quarter, but still has no plans to monetize the feature directly.

ALSO READ: 1 Major Clue That Facebook Wants to Expand Into E-Commerce

Facebook started developing a version of Facebook for use around the office and in enterprise settings in 2015. It launched globally in late 2016, and it’s quickly racked up 30,000 organizations including Wal-Mart, Heineken, Lyft, and Spotify. The platform boasts over 1 million groups, but Facebook doesn’t give any exact details about how many people are actually using the app. Unlike its other products, enterprises pay per user for premium features -- a similar model to enterprise communication tool Slack, which boasts 6 million daily users. There’s a lot of potential for additional revenue from enterprises with Workplace that is going largely unnoticed because Facebook’s consumer advertising business is so big.

Facebook added around 7,500 new employees over the past year, 2,500 in the third quarter alone, and now has 23,000 total employees. It’s also planning to hire or contract out another 10,000 jobs this year to better enforce the company’s community standards and review advertisements -- an issue Facebook has come under fire for lately. Facebook is expanding its workforce rapidly, but it’s still relatively small compared to other tech giants like Google or Amazon. Google employs over three times as many people as Facebook, so expect that number to keep climbing as Facebook grows bigger and finds new projects to tackle.

Mark Zuckerberg believes video is the future of Facebook. Over the past couple years, the company has made several investments in video. First it offered publications and celebrities cash incentives to broadcast live videos. Now it’s looking to seed content on its new Watch platform, which aims to take on YouTube for on-demand video streaming. Facebook’s reported content budget is huge, considering big dedicated video streaming services don’t spend that much more. Hulu, for example, reportedly has a budget of $2.5 billion. And it made The Handmaid’s Tale!

ALSO READ: Here's Why Facebook Could Spend $1 Billion on Video Content Through 2018

Zuck holds around 411 million Class B shares of Facebook and another 2.6 million Class A shares (with 1/10 the voting power, but the same market value). He’s already sold about 9.6 million shares in order to fund the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative -- a philanthropic vehicle he and his wife founded. Even after giving away 99% of his shares, Zuckerberg will still own around 4.2 million shares of Facebook. Those are worth about $785 million today. Who knows what they’ll be worth in 50 or 60 years once you can only chat with Zuckerberg through an Oculus headset -- or, you know, whatever virtual reality tech we’re using then.

Facebook has become a dominant force in the digital world. All around the world people are connecting with friends on Facebook, sending each other messages via WhatsApp or Messenger, and posting new photos on Instagram. When Facebook takes on a competitor (like it’s done with Snapchat) there’s not much standing in its way of success -- and rest assured it’ll keep trying until it figures it out. Its success with consumers has translated into phenomenal results with advertisers, and there’s lots of growth still to come.

John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods Market, an Amazon subsidiary, is a member of The Motley Fool’s board of directors. Suzanne Frey, an executive at Alphabet, is a member of The Motley Fool’s board of directors. Adam Levy owns shares of Amazon. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Alphabet (A shares), Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.