Facebook shows relentless global growth

In country after country, Facebook is toppling the incumbent local social network in what seems like an unstoppable march to global dominance.

After overtaking Microsoft's Windows Live Profile in Portugal and Mexico in early 2010, Facebook eclipsed StudiVZ in Germany and Google's Orkut in India later that year, and soon unseated Hyves in the Netherlands, according to the metrics firm comScore. Now Facebook is poised to triumph in what has been viewed as its ultimate popularity contest, with comScore indicating the network is likely to dethrone Orkut in social-media-mad Brazil when its December data are released.

Facebook's relentless spread is a vindication of founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg's growth-first principle, under which the social network has focused primarily on adding users, not building revenue, since its beginning. Facebook will surpass one billion users in the next few months, analysts say, and that population will be a huge asset it can tout to investors as the company prepares for an initial public offering of stock as soon as spring.

"It's been really surprising to us to see how quickly Facebook has grown, not just in Western countries or English-speaking countries, but pretty much around the world," said Carmela Aquino of comScore. "I think part of it is the network effect - when you have a big enough mass of people beginning to jump on a social network, it's only a matter of time that their friends get on the same network, and it starts to spread."

Facebook is now used by more than half the population in the United States and a number of other countries, according to the analytics company Socialbakers, but its growth is slowing in North America and much of Europe as it approaches a saturation point. Still, as Facebook prepares for its IPO, the Menlo Park, Calif.-based social-networking company's expansion in countries such as Brazil, India, Mexico, South Korea, and Vietnam suggests the social network has a bright future.

Facebook, which started in 2004 as a way for students at Ivy League universities and Stanford to socialize and did not open up to the public until 2006, first saw a majority of its traffic coming from outside the United States in 2009, according to Socialbakers. Now more than four out of five Facebook users log on from other countries.

Other online social networks also have a global draw. U.S.-based Twitter and LinkedIn pull a large majority of their visitors from outside the United States.

Just two years ago, 46 percent of visits to LinkedIn, the professional social network, came from outside the United States, according to data comScore prepared at the request of the San Jose Mercury News. Now 62 percent come from outside this country.

That sense of a borderless world for successful social networks is nowhere more true than it is in Brazil, the world's fifth most populous country, where Google's Orkut had been the entrenched king for years. Orkut had six times the volume of Facebook's monthly traffic as recently as January 2010. But while Orkut continued to grow, Facebook's Brazilian traffic erupted in 2011, according to comScore.

People familiar with the Brazilian Internet market say there were many factors in Facebook's sudden rise in the South American nation of 200 million people, including Facebook's availability in the local language and the globalization of people's social ties.