Complexity and Social Networks Blog

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4 March 2009

Facebook, data and the demographic

Ines post on the recent Facebook controversy on its Terms of Use got me thinking. Will Facebook be burdened by its user data 50+ years from now? Storage space, of course, keeps on growing, making it possible to store more data per server--or whatever we might call a place to store digital data 40 years from now-- nevertheless, server farms are a major cost factor for social networking companies. Facebook is no exemption. Just in May 2008 Facebook raised $ 100 million to buy 50.000 additional servers. A recent note on Facebook's engineering blog underlines the immense data growth that is happening everyday day:

- 2-3 Terabytes of photos are being uploaded to the site every day (more than 700 Mio photos uploaded monthly)
- FB has over one petabyte of photo storage
- Some more stats: here

Using the latest statistics provided by Facebook (FB)...

- FB has 175 million users (currently current growth: 600.000 users per day)
- the fastes growing demographic is 30+ years old

...lets assume the following
- 2009-2023 (600.000 users a day, 300 days a year)
- 2024-2038 (300.000 users a day , 300 days a year)
- 2038-2060 (100.000 user a days, 300 days a year)
- Users might not always be new users, but users who reregister with a different eMail and the like
- FB does not change its ToU so that only a minority of profiles gets deleted
- one user profile needs at least 1 MB of space
- 2.5 terrabyte of content is uploaded at 300 days a year (I slightly altered the number of people doing uploads)

By end of 2060 FB would have gathered:
- approx. 5.5 billion user profiles (5.2 Petabytes of profile data)
- approx. 19.5 Petabytes of content
- Total of 25-30 Petabytes of data

By 2060 FB's formerly young generation would be old. What would happen to the data? (Virtual)immortality at last? Would FB need to put a lot of effort into maintaining the data? No one can tell whether FB will exist 50 years from now. The above numbers are based on rough/quick assumptions and could certainly be calculated in a more accurate way. However, my goal was to offer food for thought for our readers out there. On that end I am looking forward to your comments or more precise calculations.

Posted by Alexander Schellong at March 4, 2009 5:28 PM

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