Facebook announced its third-quarter results this afternoon, and as has become the norm, the company is incredibly rich and staggeringly enormous. It’s still bigger than any other website by a large margin and growing still, slowly glomming onto every facet of civilization like a sinister katamari. The site earned more than $7 billion in revenue this quarter, up 56 percent from the same quarter last year.
Maybe more impressive: A little over a year ago, Facebook was celebrating the huge milestone of a billion users visiting the site in a single day. Now, the site is recording an average of 1.18 billion daily active users, and 1.79 billion monthly active users. That’s almost exactly a quarter of the Earth’s population.
By the middle of next year — assuming the world is not plunged into chaos that destroys our modern technological infrastructure (a big “if”) and that stats remain on track — the site will be at more than two billion monthly active users. Facebook might not be cool, but it’s so big now that that hardly matters.
