Mark Zuckerberg announced overnight that Facebook has reached one billion monthly active users. Can you believe it got there not only without spending money on advertising itself, but also by fooling us into looking at other companies’ ads? So it’s not weird at all that Facebook is celebrating by comparing itself to chairs in an ad of its own.
The warm and fuzzy 90-second clip is part of a wider ad campaign that will see Facebook promoting itself on Facebook through sponsored posts and ads on the login page. Zuckerberg wrote in a news post:
This morning, there are more than one billion people using Facebook actively each month.
If you’re reading this: thank you for giving me and my little team the honor of serving you.
Helping a billion people connect is amazing, humbling and by far the thing I am most proud of in my life.
I am committed to working every day to make Facebook better for you, and hopefully together one day we will be able to connect the rest of the world too.
Rebecca Van Dyck, Facebook’s head of consumer marketing, told the Advertising Age that the aim is to get even more people on board. “We feel like we need to be respectful and introduce ourselves and to say ‘This is what we believe in’ and ‘Come on board’.”
Since its launch in February 2004, it has clocked up 1.13 trillion Likes, set up 140 billion friend connections and currently hosts 219 billion photos. Facebook says that the median age of new users today is 22, while sign-ups in Australia peaked in October 2007 when Facebook reached 50 million users.
As much as we like to give Facebook shit over privacy issues, unwanted redesigns, crappy apps, making money off us and turning us into addicts, there’s no denying the ginormous impact it’s had on my own life let alone a billion others around the world. It feels like it came out of nowhere and all of a sudden we can’t imagine life without it. Can you imagine anything being anywhere near as ubiquitous? Probably not in our lifetime.
[Facebook via Advertising Age]