Facebook Germany Reaches More Than 1M Users, Gaining Ground on Competitor StudiVZ

December 18th, 2008

By Sahana Mysore

While Facebook has achieved significant market penetration in both Switzerland and France this year, with over 14% of the Swiss population and 10% of the French population, growth has been significant but more measured in neighboring Germany. During 2008, the number of Facebook users in Germany grew 144% from just under 500,000 to nearly 1.2 million.

While this isn’t as high as the 400%+ growth in countries like France and Switzerland, Facebook is gaining ground on its German competitors. Facebook’s doppelganger in Germany, Berlin-based StudiVZ, has reached almost 13 million users, close to 16% of the population. Xing, another popular social network based in Hamburg has reached half of that with 6.5 million users. Both sites have a big lead over Facebook’s 1% penetration in the country.

Facebook’s legal battle with StudiVZ is still unresolved. Reports that Facebook was negotiating an acquisition of StudiVZ are also yet to materialize.

For its part, Facebook has been stepping up its efforts to market more to German users. Through their internationalization efforts, Facebook released the German language version of Facebook in March of 2008. And in October, we saw Facebook reach out to German developers by launching a Facebook German Application contest similar to the fbFund.

We’ll be continuing to track the growth of Facebook in Deutschland in 2009!

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8 Responses to “Facebook Germany Reaches More Than 1M Users, Gaining Ground on Competitor StudiVZ”

Martin Weigert Says:
December 18th, 2008 at 11:56 am
Funny posting. With the flag and everything… Anyway, cool that you are not only paying attention to the US market.
Facebook.de Nutzerzahlen steigen - aber zu langsam… – e-driven.de - widgets, apps & commerce Says:
December 18th, 2008 at 2:54 pm
[...] Facebook hat sich heute Facebook in Deutschland angenommen (ein auffälliger Beitrag mit großer Deutschlandfahne). Demnach sind immerhin schon [...]
Posts about Social Media as of December 18, 2008 | The Lessnau Lounge Says:
December 18th, 2008 at 5:35 pm
[...] As many as four million visitors are expected to be on hand when Obama takes the noon-time oath Facebook Germany Reaches More Than 1M Users, Gaining Ground on Competitor StudiVZ – insidefacebook.com 12/18/2008 While Facebook has achieved significant market penetration in both [...]
Nicole Simon Says:
December 25th, 2008 at 5:09 pm
Going for German numbers you should not forget having a look at the monthly IVW numbers (the independent auditing system, you know like some others who claim to be counting but with real numbers).

In comparison for the youth market, you have to compare to schuelervz.de and studivz, Xing is and will be mainly a business network as a target.

Recently new and much more successful than facebook in a long run is wer-kennt-wen.de which you should not forget either.

The market is crowded and just having some german translation will not be enough to capture this market – most def. not for example with tv channel RTL being involved in wer kennt wen.
Nicole Simon Says:
December 25th, 2008 at 5:12 pm
forgot the numbers – wer kennt wen claims to have over 5 million users and the numbers of IVW to back it up. xing numbers afaik are the numbers in total not just for ermany, but none other than xing is clearly positioned as business network – only in social media circles does facebook have a chance to count as ‘business tool’. hth
Sahana Mysore Says:
December 25th, 2008 at 5:31 pm
Thanks for this perspective — I wasn’t familiar with either schuelervz.de / wer-kennt-wen.de or RTL’s promotion of the latter.
Spit ‘n’ Swallow » Blog Archive » #5 - SITT on it Says:
March 4th, 2009 at 2:13 pm
[...] Facebook Germany Reaches More Than 1M Users, Gaining Ground on Competitor StudiVZ (insidefacebook.com) [...]
Margaret Evans Says:
January 14th, 2010 at 8:05 am
hi everyone im new to germany facebook hope to connect with some of you