The power of facebook – the real numbers
Techcrunch have posted about some of the user numbers behind facebook. Paul Francis compiled a spreadsheet of the numbers.
NZ has 250,760 users – 71,600 male (28.55%) and 179,160 female (71.45%) ! Women outnumber men more than 2 to 1!
Looking at those numbers I would guess that we have a lot of ex-pats still calling NZ home. That’s a lot of people using face book! If what they say is true that more than 50% of facebookers log on once a day. That should put it squarely behind Trade me in terms of visits (althought bebo is more popular in NZ than facebook).
So if you’re looking for a captive NZ audience, then launching a facebook app to that audience is very very appealing. I’m not convinced that people pay any attention to the advertising!
those (gender) numbers are quite inaccurate (as the post itself notes in an edit) – you don’t need to include a gender when signing-up to fb. (so total users – a single gender != the other gender, which is what was done in this case)
Its more like 60:40 women:men, I pulled some other stats here: http://www.thomasscovell.com/blog/2007/11/08/facebook-stats-for-new-zealand-vs-the-world/
Yeah, the gender numbers are definitely not 100% accurate. Most people don’t fill in all the options. I’m more amazed at the total numbers, 250K is a lot of people. This represents a lot opportunities, especially due to the high activity rate of the users.
I’ve written an open-source app for FaceBook that uses ZoomIn, figured out the captive audience thing a while ago, and looking at hooking into other types of systems (eg Moodle); building the community a lot harder than writing apps
http://apps.facebook.com/meetspace/
Aimed at NZ audience (ZoomIn, NZLive.com) and in early stages of integration. Feedback welcome!