An SEC filing in preparation of the company’s IPO has revealed that as of December 2011 there were 432 million mobile users of Facebook, 13% of which had never touched the desktop website. This is a 76% increase over a year before, where 245 million users had accessed the mobile web.
Facebook is about to go public and instantly become one of the biggest companies in the world, with an estimated worth of $100 billion. Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s founder and CEO, is worth over $20 billion of that. As the company ramps up its mobile offering, it is expected to start showing ads to those 400+ million mobile users, which will further ramp up revenues.
While many of those mobile users are accessing the site through smartphones — Facebook is one of the most popular apps on both iOS and Android — there are many millions more who see the site through its 0.facebook.com portal, which was created aided in part by its purchase of Snaptu in April 2011. More importantly, Facebook launched an iPad app in October of last year which expanded its mobile base far beyond the smartphone world.
While 432 million users sounds like a lot (and it is!) the number of people accessing Facebook on the go has been shrinking over the past year, adding between 10-15% to its user base per month. With over 800 million total monthly visitors, and over 400 million daily visitors to the web site, mobile Facebook is definitely the largest avenue for growth, and will only get more popular as smartphones get less expensive.
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