Airbnb has released some interesting growth figures this morning, proving that 2012 was the year that Airbnb stopped being something people were talking about and started to be something (a lot of) people used.
The company announced that 4 million total guests have now used Airbnb to book a night’s stay on the peer-to-peer lodging marketplace. A whopping 3 million of those guests used the service in 2012 alone. The company launched all the way back in 2007, so that should give you a clear picture of just how much growth Airbnb has seen in the past year.
However, it’s worth noting that Airbnb hasn’t previously given growth stats in this format. In the past, the company has always touted nights booked on the service as a measure of growth, announcing 5 million nights booked in January 2012 and growing to 10 million in June.
The host side of the operation has also matured, going from 120,000 listings at the beginning of 2012 to over 300,000 listings currently up on the site.
Airbnb has proven that its San Francisco user base is a financially powerful market for the company, but we shouldn’t forget that Airbnb is a truly global marketplace, as people from over 150 different countries traveled on the service in 2012.
But to serve all those different regions, Airbnb needed language functionality, which is why the company has continued to integrate more languages, including the rapid deployment of 22 new languages in 2012, with at least 32 languages available in total.
Airbnb also included that its photographers (which it provides for free to hosts listing their spaces on the site) have taken over 800,000 pictures throughout the year.
And since announcing 1 million iOS app downloads in September, the company now has 1.2 million downloads under its belt, which is good considering that the app accounts for roughly 25 percent of Airbnb’s traffic.