DailyTech - Facebook Reports 8.7 Percent of Active User Accounts are Fake

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Internet Facebook Reports 8.7 Percent of Active User Accounts are Fake
Tiffany Kaiser - August 2, 2012 9:23 PM

27 comment(s) - last by overlandpark4m.. on Aug 7 at 9:51 PM

That is a total of about 83 million of its 955 million active users

Facebook has determined thaabs sizable portion of its user accounts are fake, which could shine a bit of bad light on the company's total number of monthly active users.

Currently, Facebook has 955 million active Facebook users. Of this total, nearly 8.7 percent (83 million) are fake accounts.

The fake accounts were further categorized into three groups, including duplicates, user misclassified and undesirable accounts.

Duplicates, meaning a user has two accounts for one person, equates to about 4.8 percent of fake monthly active users. Misclassifieds, meaning users create personal accounts for businesses or organizations, account for 2.4 percent of the fake accounts, and undesirables, or those that breach Facebook's terms of agreement, account for 1.5 percent of fake active users.

Facebook recently shared its 10-Q SEC document, which showed that Facebook only grew 10 percent to 168 million in the United States last year, where the global average is 29 percent. The document also revealed that users are leaning more toward mobile use rather than desktop PC use when accessing Facebook. The number of users that accessed Facebook by mobile device increased 23 percent since March 2012. There were 83 million mobile users in March and 102 million mobile users in June.

What does this mean exactly? It means that Facebook better get more serious about mobile -- especially in the advertising sector -- if it wants to make any ad revenue. Last year, Facebook had $3.15 billion in total advertising sales, but none of this came from ads on mobile devices. The social giant is expected to release its own smartphone in mid-2013.

Facebook also recently posted its first financial earnings report since going public in May 2012, where it failed to impress investors with a net loss of $157 million (8 cents per share). This was likely due to the $1.3 billion the company paid in compensation regarding stock-based pay after the initial public offering (IPO) in May. However, Facebook posted $1.18 billion in Q2 2012 revenues, which was a 32 percent jump from Q2 2011. This figure modestly passed analyst expectations of $1.15 billion in revenues.

Source: ValueWalk

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Bah!

By Ammohunt on 8/3/2012 2:59:58 PM , Rating: 2

This is just a marketing gimmick designed to subtlety announce their new endeavour www.fakebook.com.

"We are going to continue to work with them to make sure they understand the reality of the Internet. A lot of these people don't have Ph.Ds, and they don't have a degree in computer science." -- RIM co-CEO Michael Lazaridis