Minnesota-based Viking Magazine is doing a short piece about Facebook’s popularity in Norway, and emailed to ask if I could answer some brief questions – of course I can. And so I had to go re-check how many Norwegians are currently on Facebook. Using the trusty old method of pretending I’m making an ad targeted to all Norwegians, I found that there are 1,042,240 Norwegians on Facebook. Or at least, there are 1,042,240 Facebook profiles claiming to be Norwegians – a few are probably fake. There are 4 721 600 people living in Norway, according to Statistics Norway. Some are temporary residents who might not brand themselves “Norwegian” on Facebook. Accepting these inaccuracies, that means that about 22% of the Norwegian population is on Facebook. Not a drastic rise since October, but still growing significantly.

6 thoughts on “current Facebook use in Norway

  1. Luca

    Hi Jill,
    maybe you could find interesting a recent post made by my colleague Fabio Giglietto about growing trends of several Social Networks in different countries (http://larica-virtual.soc.uniurb.it/nextmedia/2007/12/21/paese-che-vai-social-networks-che-trovi/). We started asking why Facebook usage is so low in Italy and we discovered that Badoo is used by the 36% of italian teenagers between 18 and 19 yo. Understandig which SN fits better every country’s expectation about how a Social network should be it’s a interesting question.

    cheers

    Luca

  2. ilan

    hey there, i was wondering what’s the difference between the number you specify
    and the one i get from this page > facebook.com/networks/67109325/Norway
    where it say (by the time i write this comment) the norwegian network has 515,721 members.

    does the advertising platform has different stats from the ‘open’ stats?

  3. Jill Walker Rettberg

    Hey ilan – if you follow my link in the post above (to “trusty old method”) you’ll see I describe using the advertiser’s demographic info to see how many people have signed up as “Norwegains”. The network “Norway” has far fewer members because a lot of people don’t choose to join the netowrk – yit’s not compulsory, and in fact, many people don’t even know it exists.

    The short version of how to see Facebook demographics is to click the advertisers link at the bottom of each page, pretend you’re making an ad (just give it a fake website you’re going to promote) and then you get to play with the demographics. You don’t have to actually buy the ad.

  4. ilan

    thank you 🙂

  5. […] Det var i et blogginnlegg fra¬†Jill Walker Rettberg vi fikk ideen til denne enkle unders??kelsen. Her er noen av v?•re funn: […]

  6. […] To get even more readers to its content VG has also developed Norway’s second biggest social network, Nettby, with 657,000 members. It’s roughly half the size of Facebook in Norway and Schibsted is already in the process of exporting its operations to Sweden and Spain. […]

Leave A Comment

Recommended Posts

Triple book talk: Watch James Dobson, Jussi Parikka and me discuss our 2023 books

Thanks to everyone who came to the triple book talk of three recent books on machine vision by James Dobson, Jussi Parikka and me, and thanks for excellent questions. Several people have emailed to asked if we recorded it, and yes we did! Here you go! James and Jussi’s books […]

Image on a black background of a human hand holding a graphic showing the word AI with a blue circuit board pattern inside surrounded by blurred blue and yellow dots and a concentric circular blue design.
AI and algorithmic culture Machine Vision

Four visual registers for imaginaries of machine vision

I’m thrilled to announce another publication from our European Research Council (ERC)-funded research project on Machine Vision: Gabriele de Setaand Anya Shchetvina‘s paper analysing how Chinese AI companies visually present machine vision technologies. They find that the Chinese machine vision imaginary is global, blue and competitive.  De Seta, Gabriele, and Anya Shchetvina. “Imagining Machine […]

Do people flock to talks about ChatGPT because they are scared?

Whenever I give talks about ChatGPT and LLMs, whether to ninth graders, businesses or journalists, I meet people who are hungry for information, who really want to understand this new technology. I’ve interpreted this as interest and a need to understand – but yesterday, Eirik Solheim said that every time […]