Zuckerberg: Online Sharing Is Growing At An Exponential Rate (And Users Are Sharing 4 Billion Things A Day)

Wednesday, July 6th, 2011

Jason Kincaid currently works as a writer at TechCrunch. He grew up in Danville, California and later relocated to UCLA in Los Angeles, California, where he studied biology with a minor in ‘Society and Genetics’. You can reach him at jkincaidtc@gmail.com (he has other addresses too, so don’t worry if you have a different one). → Learn More

Today at a special event at its headquarters in Palo Alto, California, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has taken the stage to unveil some key new announcements (you can find our live notes and a live stream right here). One of the first things Zuckerberg announced: Facebook has observed the the rate that its users are sharing is increasing at an exponential rate.

He explains that if you look at any Facebook user, on average, the amount they share today is twice what they shared a year ago — and in one year they’ll probably be sharing twice as much as they are today. It’s an important trend, and it’s one that Zuckerberg says probably applies to the internet at large rather than just Facebook. But a lot of it is happening on the social network — users are now sharing 4 billion ‘things’ on Facebook every day.

So why is this important? If you look at the charts below, you can see we’re right at the elbow of the growth curve. In other words, sharing may be about to explode. The question now is what people will be sharing. You can see in the graph below that Facebook product launches have helped drive additional sharing, and the social network expects additional innovations from other companies involved in everything from music to communication to help drive this explosion of growth.



Company: Facebook
Website: facebook.com
Launch Date: February 1, 2004
Funding: $2.34B

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original idea for the term...

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