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Facebook Usage Hits 16 Billion Minutes a Day

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the thats-a-lotta-waste dept.

1sockchuck writes "Facebook's 400 million users spend more than 16 billion minutes on the site every day, and view 1 million photos every second. That's prompted massive growth in the social network's infrastructure, which now encompasses more than 60,000 servers. Facebook's Tom Cook discussed how the company's operations team manages that growth in a presentation last week at the O"Reilly Velocity conference (video). The next day at Structure 2010, Facebook Vice President of Operations Jonathan Heiliger said server and chip makers have 'come a long way' in supporting cloud platforms since he bashed them last year."

15 of 107 comments (clear)

  1. wow... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    A Lot of wasted time...

    1. Re:wow... by boneclinkz · · Score: 5, Funny

      Are you telling me that finally answering the question "which Jersey Shore character are you?", via 106-question interactive quiz, is somehow a waste of time?

      Some of us are working on a legacy to pass along, you know. When you great-great-grandchildren look at their mother and ask "mom, was great-great-granddad more like Mike 'The Situation' or D.J. Pauly D?" will she have an answer? Or will she have to look down at her feet in shame and whisper "I don't know."?

    2. Re:wow... by wvmarle · · Score: 5, Interesting

      That would be 40 minutes per user per day.

      I think it is quite reasonable to assume that half of the registered users is not using the site at all - maybe more - people lose interest, sign up for a one-time must see page, whatever. And unused accounts are not deleted of course. I am one of the less active users; I have an account and spend maybe five minutes a week on Facebook, if that much.

      So that would mean that every active user would spend almost 1 1/2 hours per day surfing that site. On average. Which falls for me in the "bullshit" category. Just totally unbelievable. I don't even waste that much time on slashdot.

      Viewing a million photos per second is more believable. I just opened my own Facebook page and found over 30 photos in the "news feed" alone. And I bet they count them all, thumbnails included. So take that as average: 30 photos on a page. And for an active Facebook browser one page every 15 seconds on average, I doubt they linger much. That is two photos a second they are "viewing". That requires 500,000 users online on average to reach that 1 mln photos a second.

      Now take that back to the time spent online: 1440 minutes in a day; 500,000 out of 400 mln actually online, that makes an average of 1.8 minutes per registered user per day to get to the required half million users online at any one moment. Hey that sounds much more reasonable to me already. And that would give me a total of a mere 720 mln minutes wasted per day on Facebook. That's a whopping two orders of magnitude off of the claimed 16 bln. My numbers may be guesstimates but I can't imagine I'm two orders of magnitude off.

      Now to think of the amount of time I wasted on this posting...

    3. Re:wow... by eulernet · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I think it is quite reasonable to assume that half of the registered users is not using the site at all

      I think the 80/20 rule applies here.
      That is: 20% of registered people use Facebook daily, and use 80% of the resources.

    4. Re:wow... by s.d. · · Score: 4, Insightful

      So that would mean that every active user would spend almost 1 1/2 hours per day surfing that site. On average. Which falls for me in the "bullshit" category. Just totally unbelievable.

      Why is this unbelievable? Just because you don't play games on the site for 3 hours a day doesn't mean other people don't...

    5. Re:wow... by RavenChild · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I work in a computer lab on my university campus. I sit in the lab for 3-5 hours a few days a week. With this kind of time, I have noticed many people come in and read/post on facebook for at least an hour every day (I have seen people using facebook for my entire shifts).

      When I notice a line starting for computers, I go around and ask the people I noticed spending too much time on facebook to let those in line have a chance. I always do this politely but even though they have spent an hour or two on facebook, I am always met with a look of disgust. Some of those people have even started yelling at me and others I've had to call campus police to escort out. It really seems as if many people have a mental addiction to social networks like facebook. They fear that they will miss something important if they aren't watching the news feed 24/7.

      Those are the type of people that I see when I'm working the lab that lead me to believe these statistics just a bit. 16 billion seems too big but I can believe at least 3-5 billion minutes are spent on facebook a day just from the people I see in the labs.

      Now something I do agree with you with respect to the pictures viewed is that facebook may also be counting the time people are logged into the facebook chat or just have a facebook window open. I know I leave firefox open all the time with facebook somewhere in my assortment of tabs.

  2. No we don't. by chickenrob · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Many of us use tabbed browsers on desktops that run 24/7 with a facebook tab open.

    --
    People say my sig is the best thing about me.
    1. Re:No we don't. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

      I just run a bot which watches all pictures on facebook to screw up their statistics.
      And then I laugh: "ha-ha! Where is your statistical interpretation now! Ha!Ha!"

    2. Re:No we don't. by Andy+Dodd · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I just had a comment from a coworker that I always seemed to be online. I replied that I used Facebook's XMPP support and was logged in to it from an IM client, even when I wasn't actually at the computer. (My home computer has Pidgin running almost constantly.)

      In addition to that, my home machine usually has Facebook open in a tab in Firefox. Facebook and GMail are pretty much my "always open even when out of the house" tabs.

      --
      retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
  3. facebook no more by stanlyb · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I have a Facebook account only to be in touch with some friends of mine......and the only "activity" that i see on my page is some smallville, zoo-ville or whatever-ville game post/request. Thank you, but no thank you. I am considering closing my account sooner than later, and i suppose there are a lot other people intending to do same.

  4. Active minutes or browser minutes? by Fnkmaster · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Are those *active* minutes where the user has actually taken some sort of physical action in the last 60 seconds or so or are those just minutes where a browser is connected to Facebook (i.e. their Javascript polling mechanism in place)?

    Anyway, looks like I'm an outlier. I log in to Facebook once or twice a week for 5-10 minutes, get rapidly disgusted, and leave. I used to leave Facebook logged in a lot and check it once every hour or two, then I realized it had become too much of a distraction and that when I left it logged in they used my login cookie for all these other unrelated sites on the web to push scarily personal information about what my Facebook-friends were doing on the web, so I blocked all that FB connect BS with Adblock and stopped leaving Facebook logged in when I wasn't actually using it. Realized how much time I was wasting with that crap too.

  5. Re:What a waste... by JustOK · · Score: 4, Funny

    and if you ever find something that is important, do let us know.

    --
    rewriting history since 2109
  6. Facebook takes lives every day - 380, to be exact by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    Given that Facebook usage is currently 16,000,000,000 minutes per day, and that the average life of a human being is approximately 42,048,000 minutes (60 minutes per hour * 24 hours per day * 365 days per year * 80 years of life on average [est.]), this means Facebook effectively sucks up the time-equivalent of the lives of a bit more than 380 people. Every. Single. Day. FACEBOOK MUST BE STOPPED!!!!1!1!1111oneoneone

  7. Re:What a waste... by numbski · · Score: 4, Funny

    This is quickly turning into a time-wasting recursion loop. We're now doing math *on Slashdot* on the amount of time people spending wasting time on Facebook.

    The only thing missing here is for this to be on idle.slashdot.org, not tech.slashdot.org. :P

    --

    Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).

  8. Economic impact by nickovs · · Score: 4, Funny

    I wonder how many of these minutes are spent at work. Consider that 16 billion minutes a day, at US$10 per hour, is just shy of $1 Trillion a year. Has anyone else noticed the correlation between the rise Facebook and the global economic meltdown?

    --
    If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?