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

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.