statistics

As far as I know nobody has yet made an analysis about the Facebook Finland network with precise data.

I managed to get my hands on some Facebook Finland network data, and as far as I know it is entirely accurate. Meaning that it should represent quite accurately what they have in the real database, and there are no intentional errors and corrupt entries in it.

The data also allows me to do some comparison to IRC-Galleria's current data and perhaps even draw a few conclusions.

All data is a snapshot from 19 january 2009 and should be accurate enough.

Facebook Finland Network data contains all accounts that claim to belong to the "Finland" regional network. However such a claim can be made by anyone. Also people can have multiple accounts. Bands have accounts. So do companies. And imaginary entities like characters from TV shows or cartoon figures. This means that not nearly all the users listed in the Finland Network are actual people. It is simply everyone who claims to belong to the network at all - with no filtering what so ever.

IRC-Galleria data is more "pure" in that sense; all of it has been either verified by a real cell-phone number or manually screened by an administrator person. There are still a few hundred known fakes in the data, and a probably a few hundred unknown ones.

Facebook data doesn't know all of its users' gender, which I guess is a result of inanimate objects and such being capable of having their own Facebook accounts. While IRC-Galleria data is gender-precise.

All data in both cases have been provided by the companies directly.

IRC-Galleria data is publicly available here:
http://irc-galleria.net/dob.php
(as pointed out in the comments. Edited & added on Jan 20th)

Some stats from the Facebook data:

* Finland Network is about 927,530 users strong
* Males represent 363,120 users or 39.14%
* Females are the clear majority with 530,510 users and 57.19%
* There are 33,900 entities of unknown gender, or 3.65%
* Largest age-group for Facebook Finland is the 25 year olds with 54,100 accounts
* The ONLY age-groups with more men in them are the 64 and 65+ year olds
* Oddly enough there are 14.81% of users by the age of 63 with unknown gender
* and 16.13% of 61 year olds with unknown gender
* in 14 year old the unknowns only represent 0.63%
* The 25 year olds have most entities with unknown gender; 2180

Stats from the IRC-Galleria data:

* IRC-Galleria data only contains data for 12 to 40 year olds, not extending as high up as Facebook data does
* IRC-Galleria is 506,751 users strong
* About 7 thousand users are over 40 and thus not included in any of the following stats
* Females dominate again: there are 257,061 females to 242,025 males
* Largest user group is the 16 year olds with 47,705 users
* While the average age is still well above 20 at 20.41 years
* In all the younger age-groups females dominate, until at 21 years of age the tide turns and from thereon males form the majority
* The biggest difference is in 15 year olds with clear female dominance of 59.14%
* While after the tide turning 30 year old males form a majority of 68.57%

And here's the real beef, some charts that chew through the data.

Each image opens up to a higher resolution version for better examination of the data. All charts were made with Apple Numbers (which did beat the hell out of excel for this task):

Image: Facbook Finland Network by Volume, Age and Gender

Image: Facebook Finland Network by Gender distribution and Age

Image: IRC-Galleria by Volume, Age and Gender

Image: IRC-Galleria by Gender distribution and Age

And the Grande Finale:

Image: Facebook Finland Network vs IRC-Galleria on the same scale

I am not going to share the specific numeric data with you on this post. But if you do want to get it; feel free to contact me directly, or leave a comment.

..and then for some conclusions from all of this:

• IRC-Galleria is a service used by "young girls and old men" ;-)
• Facebook seems to have a whole lot of fakes and non-people profiles in the Finland network; if you compare some age group masses to the actual population structure, it doesn't quite add up.
• IRC-Galleria is clearly a youth service, where as Facebook is more used by folks that are generally 4-8 years older
• Finland seems to have an odd "business networking inside Facebook" effect that draws many senior professionals in there. (just a theory/idea)
• Facebook's data shows weird stuff about older males; they use it clearly more than females of the same age, wonder why is that? Grand daddys more adaptive to the Interwebz than grannies?
• The obvious: Social Media services are very much a Girlie Thing. The female dominance in the user figures is quite evident.
• Facebook has been way more successful in attracting females of all ages than IRC-Galleria has. This is quite obvious from looking at the both services in the same scale chart: the violet-color females are so much more "thick" and present in the Facebook demographics.
• Final interesting fact: according to my sources IRC-Galleria is about 6 times better than Facebook in monetizing its users. If Facebook would be equally good in monetization they would make over 2 billion EUR of annual revenue, which they certainly do not achieve quite yet.

I did this whole numbers play without really considering much about what facets in the data might be the most interesting.

How do you find all this, and is there anything useful or insightful in it?

Just letting you know that this blog has had about 10 thousand unique visitors according to Google Analytics during the first month of its life.

Biggest incoming traffic has been the result of two spikes: 1) the finnish digimedia writing about www.IRC-Galleria.net stuff and about 10 to 15 other blogs publishing either that same content or announcing that this blog has opened up (thank you for that bloggers!), 2) TechCrunch and ArcticStartup writing about Fruugo gossip.

Interesting details from statistics:

- There has been more overall incoming traffic from www.ArcticStartup.com (and from Vierityspalkki) than from TechCrunch ;-)

- Facebook is the biggest referrer overall (I publish entries on status messages and as an incoming RSS feed to my FB Notes). Seems to actually work better than anticipated. Nice. That stuff is visible only to my FB friends, which leads me to think that they must really read my writings (thanks) or they are just being nice..

- Google.com direct search traffic is huge; 3rd largest referrer.

- Jaiku is way above Twitter as referrer.

- I have had 12 visitors to my blog coming in with a search keyword "world of warcraft addiction" W00t? LOL =)

- Fruugo story is by far the most read.

- Half the traffic is returning visitors

I can say that I'm satisfied with the level of readers here during the first month. However I would wish for more comments and more discussions to appear on the blog. Many have commented my tweets or status messages, and I would rather see those comments here instead - and hopefully get some conversation going.

Thank you for reading! Keep at it! (and comment when you fell like it)

BTW: is there any kind of well-established and easy way to measure your RSS feed subscriptions? Drupal default stats don't quite do the trick as well as they should.

www.irc-galleria.net has been the most loaded/active website of Scandinavia since about 2006. Back in September of 2006 this article (in Finnish) was published claiming IG as the most busy website in Scandinavia. Since that time the key numbers have gone up significantly.

The level of user activity remains at a much higher level than any other social media site on the web. In terms of "how often do the users login and do stuff?" IG pretty much beats the heck out of Facebook and posse. And they show no signs of slowing down either.

Some fresh stats:

- About 950.000 unique visitors per week (according to TNS Metrix)
- Over 504 thousand registered users
- Average user is 20.29 years, 60% are over 18
- The site reaches over 70% of 15-24 year old Finns monthly (making it a huge youth media in Finland, bigger by reach than any TV channel)
- Almost 60% of the registered users log in daily.
- 80% of the users log in weekly.
- Every day over 70.000 new pictures are added.
- There are 8 326 692 pictures visible.
- And millions more hidden from the public (estimated at 30-40 million pics total)
- every day over 40.000 blog entries are written on the site.
- Many audio blog entries and video blog entries as well.
- IG's users have self-organized to more than 500K community and interest groups.
- Over 1 million messages/comments are written every day
- There are an estimated 2-3+ billion comments (some really old ones get cleared occasionally etc).
- Monthly page loads are around 2.5 up to 4.2 (or so) billion per month. This is a significant percentage of Facebook or Yahoo! page loads, generated by site that has a fraction of the users they do; just one very strong proof of IG's super-active members.
- Front page alone gets tens of millions of loads per day, up to few thousand per second etc.

As a result of this amazing activity level that has remained high for years and years IG is also one of the most brilliant examples of end user revenue generation and profit. Who ever says that there are no models on how to monetize social media is dead wrong and obviously hasn't looked at IRC-Galleria.

How many of their registered users pay money for any of the services on the site? As many as over 80%. This number is significantly higher than any other conversion rate in any service I have heard of. I challenge you to find a service that would be "free, paying is optional" that would have a conversion rate higher than that anywhere in the world.

While I'm not a part of the company any more operationally (I'm an owner of Sulake nowdays), their success and strong continuing growth is something I (and the whole team) can be very proud of! It's a shame that the service isn't in english and going head to head with Facebook, because with those key figures expanded to a global scale, it would certainly win ;-) Which is probably part of the why IG is going to come out with some internationalization news and things in the near future..