According to the CIA World Factbook, the global death rate, annually, is 8.18 per 1,000, or 0.00818% of the population. That means that if Facebook has 750 million users (which is a conservative guess, I realize, as they’re probably closer to a billion at this point, but that’s the last public number they gave), and 0.00818% of them die every year, that 6,090,000 Facebook users die every year, which means that 16,673 die every day, and 11 Facebook users die every minute.
Aside from being a depressing number overall, it makes their continued increase in size slightly more remarkable; they’re not just able to go from, say, 500 to 750 million, they’re able to do that while also recovering all of the users who’ve died in the past year.
Did I have a point with this? Crap no! I thought this was a fun, depressing fact to share.
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Walt Mosspuppet: Tech News and Opinion 
Your calculation are I think far from the true, you didn’t take into account few points:
1. Most of Facebook users are young people, The percentage of old people using Facebook is much lower than their percentage in the population.
2. The percentage of people using Facebook from countries with higher life expectancy is higher than from countries with lower life expectancy
Both issues can effect your calculation a lot.
I’ll take issue with your first point, as there are LOTS of non young-people on Facebook. The 2nd point is true in that I compared the world death rate to facebook, and didn’t weigh it according to the number of users in those other countries. Considering the fact that the US, which is a pretty big market for Facebook, has a death rate higher than the global average (8.38/1000 versus 8.18/1000), I don’t imagine it would affect that estimate ALL that much.
Well, I wouldn’t be too impressed by Facebook overcoming attrition just yet: How many of those FB users who have died have had their accounts deactivated. It doesn’t happen automatically, and like a lot of computer accounts, rarely does someone bother to come in afterward and shut it down.
The zombie invasion is slowly spreading on Facebook…
That’s a good point.
Both VERY sad, yet interesting
Both VERY sad, yet fascinating.
:(((((
Small point about the maths:
The global death rate is spread across all ages – which isn’t the same as facebook where the users are heavily weighted towards the younger.
Taking the UK out of the 30m facebook users 24m are ages 40 and under.
um, you’re all missing the major flaw – not all of the population has access to a) A computer and/or portable device and b) The Internet of those computers and/or portable devices.
You need to consider the fact that not everyone has the potential to be a facebook user.
On the age point, statistics bare out that it would most likely be a standard bell curve peaking at the 20-30 year old demographic….
The fact that the entirety of the planet doesn’t negate the relevance of a global death rate. Certainly the breakdown of age would affect it, but I don’t imagine it would make a MASSIVE difference.
the only flaw with your stats is that you are applying a Global statistic to a select group of people. would the stat hold true if applied to of all people of high school age(14-18)? would it hold true for all people whose name begins with a “T” sound? that one problem with applying statistics from a general group to a specific group. they do not always hold true. since facebook is not available to EVERYONE in the world, the way you used this stat would not necessarily hold up.
but it is interesting as a global view
Nice straw man, sucker!
No, it wouldn’t necessarily hold true of 14-18 or people whose names start with “T,” but so what? Over 10% of the entire SPECIES uses Facebook actively, and so even if the number I came up with isn’t completely right, it’s going to be in the ballpark. And it points to something we don’t think about that much, which was the real goddamn point of the post.
I won’t argue with your maths, I’ll just be happy that Facebook users die.