Facebook and Toronto
A link in the Slaw Linkblog points to a Star story that claims Facebook has over a 1,000,000 subscribers in Toronto:
More than a million Torontonians made friends with Facebook in 2007, contributing to the “phenomenal growth” in Canadian users last year.
Toronto was the first city in North America to break 1 million subscribers, a recent study shows.
…The study also found that most Canadians who logged on to Facebook are between the ages of 18 to 34
Can this number of users be remotely right?
Let’s assume for the sake of argument that Toronto embraces the entire GTA, which gives us something like 5 million people to play with. The Star stat would mean Facebook has a takeup rate of 20% of the total population. But we have to eliminate young children and the old from the population of potential Facebook users; so let’s say (using StatsCan figures) that the “elderly” constitute 13%; and since the percentage under the age of 19 is 24, assuming an even distribution of ages, if we exclude children 12 and under we can eliminate 14% of the population. We now have 73% of the population as potential Facebookers, or something like 3.6 million. Pausing there would give us about a 30% takeup rate: Look to your left, look to your right, one of you at least is on Facebook.
In reality the pool of likely Facebook users is going to be much smaller than this — lack of interest, illness, disability, language problems, and concentration of ages in the range Facebook gives — pushing the claimed takeup rate even higher. All of which seems like hype to me. I suspect there’s a great number of cases where one person has multiple accounts — after all, the chance to have online personas that differ from one’s everyday presentation of self is half of the idea I’d say. And I suspect that Facebook pushed the boundaries of “Toronto” well past the GTA.
What do others think?
Reports from “the field” are that it is very difficult to sign up for multiple accounts. I haven’t tried it myself, but I know others tell me that whereas MySpace was known for having lots of accounts to help drive up popularity numbers of certain pages, Facebook has some sort of mystical algorithm that prevents people from going crazy creating lots of accounts.
Hmmm…I haven’t tried it myself.
Do some searching online – this has been reported in the past. It’s due to a wider definition of Toronto than the GTA total. Similarly, Victoria residents were grouped with Vancouver (because Vancouver Island is totally part of Vancouver City, right?). I believe the Victoria issue has been since resolved.
Personally I’m not surprised that the numbers could be as high as one in three. Even Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente is on Facebook after all!
Toronto was considered the largest city on Facebook for a time as well.
I seem to recall that Facebook considered most of southern Ontario to be Toronto – including e.g. Kingston… Not sure about Ottawa. So some scepticism about the million in Toronto as we know it …. (OTOH I would not draw the line at age 12, either.)
Simon:
Are you taking into account the odd nature of Toronto’s population? Some residents aren’t necessarily included in the official population numbers. For example we have thousands of students at three major universities as well as dozens of post secondary college campuses full of Facebookers who either don’t live in Toronto or commute or are temporary for the school terms. The daytime population of Toronto swells by hundreds of thousands due to inward commuters from the GTA and beyond. It wouold make a difference to your estimates and Facebook’s too.
From my own informal survey over Christmas I coldn’t find a single person under 50 and over 12 without an account on Facebook.
Stephen
This is not surprising to me considering that further to Microsoft’s purchase of a minority interest in Facebook, users who did not have a Facebook profile are now invited to create one via MSN Messenger and the likes. The push provided by Microsoft certainly helped Facebook consolidate its position in the Toronto market.
Stephen: well … now you know of one person who doesn’t have a Facebook or LinkedIn or Twitter etc account.
I’m going to guess that Facebook’s math borrows from the AOL approach back in AOL’s prime: the number who sign on [full stop], forgetting [g] to subtract the number who leave and the number who never use the account at all.
FB’s lustre is completely off for me these days, but their traffic is undoubtedly huge. Yes I believe it.
I’ve talked traffic stats with 3 different net-ops people now, and unless it gets blocked, Facebook’s traffic is double or triple that of Google’s.
And btw, who wants to be the first to send David a Linkedin invite? ;)