Facebook’s April 2010 US Traffic by Age and Sex: A Return to Strong Growth

Following up on what appeared to be a slow March, Facebook traffic boomed again in April across demographic groups in the United States. Young adult age groups contributed the most, with women ages 18 to 25 leading in numeric growth. Overall, the site grew from 113 million to 120 million monthly active users.

Here’s a closer look.

Women between 18 and 25 continue to make up the single largest group of Facebook users nationwide, adding up to more than 17 million today. Young men their ages are the second-largest, with 15.2 million.

Older young adults, between the ages of 26 and 34, continue to be the second largest groups. Women between ages of 35 and 44 or following close behind.

The overall trends played out a little differently this past month, though. Women between 18 and 25 added nearly 1 million more to their ranks, their male counterparts were slightly outpaced by slightly older men and women. Men and women between 34 and 54 also joined in considerable numbers.

But high starting numbers leads to growth rates looking weaker. Relatively speaking, the number of younger women and men on the site didn’t grow by that much.

Meanwhile, the fact that Facebook is more female than male (by 55% to 45% or so), has suggested that there have been men out there who haven’t joined. Especially older men. Many more of them joined last month than we’d been seeing in recent months, leading to a big surge in the growth rate. Men between 55 and 65 grew the most out of any group, at 8.8%.

Some final notes about the data. We get it from Facebook’s advertising tool. It has proven to be in line with third-party measures of Facebook’s traffic, as well with Facebook’s officially disclosed traffic numbers. However, the tool appears to report numbers that are dated by at least several weeks. Therefore, it is possible that these numbers represent at least some part of February and early March, and don’t cover the most recent weeks.

With this context, one can piece together the impact of significant events on the user base. For example, Facebook introduced a home page redesign at the beginning of February. If that resulted in any traffic decreases, they are not clearly visible given the across-the-board growth we’re seeing now.

If you’d like to read more analysis on traffic and growth by demographic, you may also be interested looking at Inside Facebook Gold, our data and analysis membership service focused on the Facebook business ecosystem.

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5 Responses to “Facebook’s April 2010 US Traffic by Age and Sex: A Return to Strong Growth”

  1. DSM says:

    I find those numbers highly dubious from a site that no longer requires verified .edu addresses.

    As you should be well aware, there are companies out there soley for the purpose of generating fake profiles to boost fan page numbers and spamming.

    On top of that, who in their right mind would give any website their real birthdate or private info. You’d be stupid to give FB any.

  2. Tessa says:

    DSM, could you elaborate? Why would that be stupid to provide FB with birthday info?

  3. Nicole says:

    Makes sense because April is when future college and grad students send in their deposits and get new school emails and new reasons to join in prep for Fall 2010.

  4. DSM says:

    All you need is a persons name and date of birth. And lets be honest. FB is not fort knox.

    As for the college influx, my network only grew by 1200 people. And with all the schools out there, that doesn’t come anywhere near 7 million or even 1 million. I’d like to see the specific breakdown of network growth, not a “everybody” number.

  5. Grace Meng says:

    I’m curious what the numbers will be like next month, when users have absorbed FB’s new changes, like Personalization and Connections. FB is obviously trying really hard to maintain a sense of intimacy and connections even as they push users to be more public with their information, but at what point is that going to be just impossible?

    http://blog.myplaceinthecrowd.org/2010/05/06/building-a-community-the-implications-of-facebooks-new-features-for-privacy-and-community/

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