In April, Facebook publicly announced that they had passed a fairly significant milestone: 200 million active users worldwide. That number has since passed 225 million, according to Facebook board member Marc Andreessen.
Additionally, Andreessen told Reuters that Facebook will have revenue of more than $500 million for 2009, and that he expects the company to be doing billions of dollars in sales within the next five years. The Netscape and Ning founder (who also just launched a new venture capital firm) also seems to share the Facebook philosophy that for now, adding users is more important than rapidly increasing ad sales.
And considering that it’s been only three months since Facebook passed the 200 million member milestone, Andreessen’s report makes it safe to say that the social network is still adding hundreds of thousands of new users daily.
With what appears to remain incredibly robust growth at Facebook (
), it’s a bit surprising to see the company continue to push such dramatic changes to the core of its service; in other words, some would say, if it’s not broke, don’t fix it (See: Facebook’s Twitterification: Is it the Right Move?).
Nonetheless, risk taking and constant innovation seem to be what’s put the company at the top of the social networking heap. And while users might openly oppose changes with their comments, groups, and status updates, the numbers show they certainly aren’t yet abandoning Facebook for someplace else because of them.
