Web 2.0 brought a social revolution that most weren’t expecting and many have yet to catch up with. [1] Markus Frind ([2] pof) points out a couple of great points in his post “[3] Facebook Continues On“. Markus’s writing describes his frustration with the recent growth in [4] Facebook and gives his professional opinion on where the site is going and what we can learn from it’s bubble.

Facebook’s advertisers are expected to net the network over $150,000,000 in revenues this year.

The best part is that [4] Facebook spent nothing on advertising to earn this revenue. What a significant return on investment when your advertising model revolves around [5] viral activity. The website is basically one big viral advertising party! Facebook did a good job of collecting a very targeted and marketable demographic. Most of the website’s users are between 18-24 years old and have a collective home income of $100,000 or above annually.

64% of all Facebook users are considered addicts.

The number 6 site in the United States knows how to get it’s audience’s attention and keep it. This is also part of it’s foundation and was built in to the website from the beginning. It’s a social network– people login all of the time. In fact, there are [6] one million concurrent sessions on Facebook at any given time.

This activity has collected over one billion photos(120TB worth), and shows that over half of [4] Facebook’s users login daily. This is huge! Not only does this activity show the integrity of it’s members, it also proves there aren’t accounts being made to spam king around the Facebook interwebs.

Over 18 Million People Use Facebook

It requires over 2TB of RAM to support the one billion page views per day. The number of [4] Facebook users has more than tripled since this time last year. And it’s not plateauing off anytime soon, either. Facebook nets 500,000 new users every week (a 3% growth). The 25-35 age demographic is seeing a huge growth right now, too. I’m sure the open registration has had something to do with this, but 18 million is a huge number.

Markus goes on about how Facebook is changing online dating:

“Since facebook’s explosion in Canada i’m seeing a migration of women off my site onto facebook and using it as a dating site. Its amazing to see pageviews per user and session time decline as hundreds of thousands of users start using both sites at the same time.

As i was saying in the previous post, social networks are subsuming free and paid dating sites and the market will not support both. Paid dating sites have lost more then 20% of their traffic in the last year and its accelerating. There will come a point where these paid sites drop below critical mass and the sites will simply no longer work.”

[2] Plentyoffish is obviously feeling the wrath of web2.0 and the social network bubble. But, is it just a bubble or will [4] Facebook continue growing as it is now? The growth that is motivating Markus to innovate his free dating website is the same growth he experienced when starting out. Will Facebook and other social networks eventually plateau too, as the hype dies down and people get used to them? It’s likely. Always be projecting. Always be innovating.