By The Numbers: Putting Facebook's Staggering Growth In Perspective

On Wednesday, Facebook Inc (NASDAQ: FB) reported some impressive Q4 numbers, including 83 percent earnings growth and a 17 percent increase in monthly active users. The Facebook growth story has been extremely impressive. Here are a few ways to put some of the staggering numbers in perspective.

Fun With Figures

Back in August 2015, CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted that Facebook had 1 billion active users in a single day roughly 11 years after it was founded in 2004. Considering the Xia Dynasty in China began at around 2100 BC, it took china roughly 4,080 years to reach a population of 1 billion citizens.

Facebook reported 1.86 billion MAUs in Q4. That’s slightly more that the total number of views the most popular musical artist on Vevo got in 2016. That artist was Justin Bieber.

Facebook’s daily active users jumped 18 percent in Q4 to 1.23 billion. That’s roughly the weight (in pounds) of the total amount of potato chips Americans consume each year.

Facebook’s mobile DAUs came in at 1.15 billion on the quarter. Considering there are 1,850 steps in the Empire State Building, you would need to make a tower of more than 620,000 Empire State Buildings to reach 1.15 billion steps.

An astounding 91 percent of millennials have Facebook accounts. That’s the same percentage as the share of global smartphone profits that Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) rakes in each year.

By 2018, Facebook will have an estimated 169 million total U.S. users. That’s roughly twice the number of iPhones that Apple sold (76.3 million) in Q4.

The average Facebook user has 155 friends. That’s the same number of people that the average American farmer feeds per year.

There have been 1.13 trillion total likes on Facebook since the feature was added in 2009. That’s roughly the same as the number of total digital photos that will be taken in the entire world in 2017.