[dotsh]

Probably half of that are fake profiles, profiles made by people for commercial purposes or bots. If you make fake account and you will start wandering in the endless facebook steppes, you will notice that many of them are one post account that advertise or play games. The best ones are those with pictures of known or lesser known models to collect friends and sell such an account for dollars later. I have reported several hundred of such profiles, of which maybe 1/20 have been blocked rest is fine because moderators can't see difference between real life person and photo from google images in 20 accounts in a row...

[philwelch]

2.2 billion isn't the total number of accounts, it's the number of "monthly active users"--and Facebook would probably be in much hotter water than they are now if they cooked the books on that number.

[dotsh]

This don't change my comment still many of them are fakes. I know people who have 5-6 accounts active at one time playing different games with 500+ friends on it. Many of those "friends" also are fakes, some even with the same profile picture of "real person" with fake data but I have nothing against FB, every medium is abused.

It's just interesting that not a single research was done on this topic that I know about. :)

[da02]

Why do your friends have 5+ accounts opened? To get around limits on games?

[dotsh]

Game limits, not wanting to share private account with some random folks used in games or for commercial purposes aka selling account later on and I can tell that this business is booming! :)

[dorgo]

I used to create new accounts each time when I logged into facebook. Better than to remember passwords.

[stctgion]

I've heard that you count as a monthly active user if you sign into something else using your FB account. If true that would inflate the number quite a bit

[pkulak]

Bots are active though, right?

[ExcelSaga]

Yeah, but they’re not looking at ads or providing useful data for brokers.

[emodendroket]

Let's assume that half of them are fakes. Now they have "only" 1.1 billion users every month. The number is still staggering.

[dotsh]

Yea, that is still a huge number, but for advertisers that use FB as a platform is a huge waste of money and FB could easily abuse that as well.

[emodendroket]

Advertisers in any medium probably have to accept that some people aren't paying any attention to the ad. High-viewership events cost more to advertise on, but a significant portion of the audience is going to wander off at any given commercial break.

[nvr219]

yeah, at least 4 of those 2.2 billion are mine.