9% Of Facebook Accounts Are Fake

Sites include Facebook.com . Published on August 17th, 2012. Written by Anthony West.

The number of people using Facebook is quite staggering, but every now and then the social networking giant has to face up the fact that the numbers aren’t entirely true.

In actual fact, around 9% of Facebook’s stated registered accounts are fake. That means that by the latest announcement of 955 million active users, 83 million or so are either bots or people with multiple accounts. Of course, that still leaves a whopping 872 ‘real’ users and that is enough to generate billions a year in ad revenue. So, whilst it may cause Facebook some discomfort, I doubt it’s the first thing that dominates the board’s mind insofar as monetization is concerned.

Facebook explained in a 10-Q filing recently how it calculates monthly active users (MAUs) and the challenges inherent in pinning down the numbers: “The numbers of our MAUs (Monthly Active Users) and DAUs (Daily Active Users) and ARPU (Average Revenue Per Users)  are calculated using internal company data based on the activity of user accounts. While these numbers are based on what we believe to be reasonable estimates of our user base for the applicable period of measurement, there are inherent challenges in measuring usage of our products across large online and mobile populations around the world. For example, there may be individuals who maintain one or more Facebook accounts in violation of our terms of service, despite our efforts to detect and suppress such behavior.”

So there you have it, from the horse’s mouth; some users no matter how hard you try will do things that violate the TOS. Still, Facebook looks poised to do well with the accounts that are actually fake. Cost per click is up on ads and more businesses are flocking to the site in an effort to make some cash off the back of the 872 active users.