A journalist from Aftenposten’s jobs and education supplement is about to call me to interview me about Facebook, so I’m checking up on some stats and such. And I had a geek at the interview about Facebook Bergen Student TV did with me and Morten a couple of weeks ago (see March 11, 2007) – they did a great job of editing it down, it came out excellent.
Students have been telling me that Facebook has exploded in Norway in the last month or so. Internationally, Facebook has also grown a lot recently – they had 6.5 million users in June 2006, before they opened the site up to everyone (even Norwegians and people not affiliated with a university or college) and they had 18 million users by February 2007. Alexa’s traffic ranking for Norway shows that Facebook is now the 18th most popular site in Norway, behind Gule Sider (10th) (the yellow pages, which also provides a good map search), YouTube (7th) and Myspace (15th) but well ahead of NRK (21st) or the University of Oslo (52nd) or University of Bergen (63rd). I can’t find a more recent percentage of college students in the US who are members than this one from 2005: at that point, 85% were on Facebook, which is an amazingly high penetration.
Facebook staff can even track people’s television habits and the commercial breaks based on activity levels on Facebook. Here’s a graph showing how Facebooks watch Grey’s Anatomy on Thursday nights.
I was lucky enough to attend a course on how to do a TV interview this morning, with a professional media advisor, hired by the University, who wants more of us to dare to say yes to doing television – I’m trying out some of her advice now on focussing what I want to say. I’ll tell you more about the TV course later, now I want to go out into the glorious sun!
[Update March 28: Facebook is now the 16th most popular site in Norway, by Alexa’s count.]
[Update April 18: And now Facebook is the 9th most popular site in Norway.]
