If Facebook were a country, it would be the eighth...

10:52 am - Wed, Jan 7, 2009: 56 notes

If Facebook were a country, it would be the eighth most populated in the world, just ahead of Japan, Russia and Nigeria.

Mark Zuckerberg on the Facebook Blog (via jonathan-deamer)

Right, except its demographics would be a bit skewed.

There would be no children and no elderly.

Half of the population would be dead, flopped over in their houses, with nobody noticing or caring. But they’re still counted in the census!

A quarter of the population would be marketing consultants yelling advertisements at everyone. They’re counted, too.

And nobody, including the government, would be making any money or producing much of lasting value.

(via marco)

Careful Marco. Nearly every complaint you have of Facebook can be attributed to Tumblr also, where the bulk of the consumption is done via the Dashboard, ergo the generators are also the greatest source of consumers. If Tumblr were a country, it would be Iceland - a relatively small, culturally isolated, massively inbred yet loyal citizenry with no means of visible income (yet), but even this statement is as pointless as Zuckerberg’s original one.

Let’s humor Zuckerberg’s viewpoint. If we wanted to treat passive media consumers as a “country”, I can guarantee that another traditional media outlets such as say CNN is pumped into more homes globally via cable than registered users on Facebook. As a thought exercise, of 100mm homes in the US, say 75% have cable and CNN has 90% cable carrier distribution (probably 100%), multiplied by say 3 people per average home and you get 202mm passive “citizens”. Multiply that times maybe 4X conservatively for the globe and CNN’s 800mm eclipses Facebook’s 180mm making Zuckerberg’s claim much lower down than the eighth most populated media outlet/country in the world.

I repeat, this is a silly exercise. I’m sure Marco would agree.