Facebook: What is meant by ''Active Users”:

On the first page of Facebook’s IPO prospectus for its sale of stock to the public, it pegs the number of its “monthly active users” at a whopping 84.50 Crore people. The social networking site arrives at an even more astounding number when it comes to “daily active users”: 48.30 Crore people.

Active User..!

If you managed to wade through to Page 44 of Facebook’s prospectus, you did discover that the company provides a definition of an “active user” – and it is unlikely to be what you expected.
Facebook counts as “active” users who go to its website or its mobile site. But it also counts an entire other category of people who do not click on facebook.com as “active users.”

According to the Facebook company, a user is considered active if he/she “took an action to share content or activity with his or her Facebook friends or connections via a 3rd party website that is integrated with Facebook”.

In other words, every time you press the “Like” button on any website, you’re an “active user” of Facebook.

Perhaps you share a Twitter message on your Facebook account? That would make you an active Facebook user, too. Have you ever shared music on Spotify with a friend? You are an active Facebook user. If you have logged into Huffington Post using your Facebook account and left a comment on the site – your comment was automatically shared on Facebook – you, too, are an “active user” even though you’ve never actually spent any time on facebook.com.

In December, 2011 Nielsen, which tracks usage on the internet, counted 15.30 crore unique users on the Facebook website for the month in the United States, although Facebook says in its filing that it has 16.10 crore monthly active users.

Assuming that Facebook’s US traffic accounts for only about 19% of its business, that means the numbers are off by at least 4 Crore users from the 84.5o crore Facebook defines as “active”. Facebook says in its prospectus that its numbers “will differ from estimates published by third parties due to differences in methodology”.

The company acknowledged that “there are inherent challenges in measuring usage across large online and mobile populations around the world” because, for example, “applications on certain mobile devices may automatically contact our servers for regular updates with no user action involved, and this activity may cause our system to count the user associated with such a device as an active user of Facebook.”

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