Facebook is highlighting a new metric of its global domination, and it’s mind-boggling.
During its third quarter earnings call Oct. 30, CEO and cofounder Mark Zuckerberg said 2.6 billion users were using at least one of Facebook’s products—which include Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram—at least once a month. That number is up from 2.5 billion this summer, when Facebook first started touting the figure to show investors it’s doing just fine.
That means about 34% of all humans on Earth, one in three people, regularly use an app or website provided by the Silicon Valley giant.
Now that that’s sunk in, we should note that if you count all people that are legally allowed to and capable of using the products (kids under 14 make up around one-fourth of the world’s population, according to the World Bank) that proportion is even higher. And then you have to consider how many people actually have access to the internet in the first place, which, according to one estimate, is just over 4 billion. Two thirds of all internet users log onto a Facebook product. No wonder Zuckerberg keeps bringing it up.