Facebooks Path to Global Social Network Domination
From just a few thousand users in 2004 to 2.7 billion monthly active users (MAUs) in 2020, Facebook is by far the worlds largest social network.
But its massive global footprint did not grow overnight. While Facebook is the most popular social network in many countries, this traction didn’t happen overnight. And in other places, it still has not quite taken off.
To see Facebooks path to domination, we mapped each countrys most popular social network from 2008‒2020. The data was tabulated by Vincenzo Cosenza at Vincos.it by examining annual traffic data from Alexa and SimilarWeb.
Facebook Grows From the Americas to Southeast Asia
What famously started as Mark Zuckerbergs late-night intoxicated project called Facemash—a hot or not type website for students at Harvard University—soon evolved into the worlds predominant social network.
Before 2008, the social network landscape was populated by social network pioneers such as Myspace and Hi5. Googles Orkut was the most popular network in Brazil and India, and Friendster found a foothold in Southeast Asia.
But the Facebook wave came in earnest. By 2009, the social media giant took the title of most popular network for the bulk of the Americas, Europe, South Asia, and Oceania, with Orkut in Brazil being the sole holdout until 2011.