As Facebook launches its first real-money social game, David Snook takes a look at what it means for the social gaming market.
In just over two years, the number of people who log on to Facebook each month has doubled – to over one billion. Of the 2.5 billion internet users in the world, 40 per cent of them have a Facebook account.
Eighty-one per cent of Facebook users live outside of North America and more than half have accounts on their mobile phones, which appears to be a more popular route for the social network than computers. The average age of the Facebook user is 22, down from 23 in 2010 and 26 in 2008.
Where do they live? Countries like India, Brazil, Indonesia and Mexico, but they are unlikely to be from China, which has the world’s largest internet population. It is interesting to note that Facebook accepts that 8.7 per cent of users are probably false accounts or duplicates – and that means 87 million of them.
Each regular user has just over 300 ‘friends’ and around six million users have more than double that. The company ‘went public’ in May in what is reckoned to have been a somewhat botched exercise from which its stock has never really recovered. Now it has begun advertising for the first time – and it has started a gambling application…
This article can be read in full in the December issue of iNTERGAMINGi.
