Apples And Oranges: Comparing Facebook's Massive Numbers To A Bunch Of Other Stuff

You can love it or hate or not give a hoot one way or another, but it sometimes can be difficult to grasp the sheer size of the king of all social media, Facebook Inc FB.

Here’s a look at the one-time MySpace rival, with an assist from Zephoria Digital Marketing and Loop Capital Markets, by the numbers:

• If you count all of our evolutionary ancestors, it took planet earth 6 million years to reach 1 billion people. It took Facebook 8.7 years to reach 1 billion users.
• More people use FB’s Instagram Stories every day — 200 million — than commute to work every day (143 million) in the United States.
• If the 1.74 billion mobile active users were a country, Facebook Nation’s phone users would outnumber the populations of China (1.38 billion) and India (1.32 billion).
• Facebook’s mobile Messenger service alone is nearly quadruple the population of the United States, with 1.2 billion active users.
• Facebook’s $408.4 million market cap, if it were converted to GDP, would place it 28th among the world’s 196 countries, behind Iran and ahead of Thailand.
• There are 83 million fake profiles on Facebook. Based on a random sampling, 5.86 million of the nation’s 18.2 million undergraduates in the United States have used fake IDs.
• Facebook has more advertisers per month (5 million) than 27 U.S. states have people.
• Facebook has more daily active users and more active mobile users than McDonald's Corporation MCD has Big Mac eaters annually around the globe (900 million).
• The United States has about as many guns (270 million to 310 million) as Facebook has users in Europe (307 million).