Tuesday, October 5, 2010

700 billion minutes a month

Wow, that's over 11 billion hours! What does this time represent, you ask? Amount of time the US population sleeps in a month? Maybe watches TV? Or amount of time Spongebob episodes occupy the airwaves?

No, it is the number of minutes the world population spends on Facebook. Per Month.

This was the most astonishing stat I heard at shop.org last week as stated by Facebook's VP of Global Sales, Mike Murphy.

Assuming that time spent on Facebook is not a measurably productive past-time, that number is a serious drag on the world's GDP. Sure, there is value in creating and maintaining relationships, in many cases over great distances, but there is no economic benefit to reading what friends had for lunch--except maybe to Facebook. Do we really have the time to spend on Facebook given the world's current economic doldrums? Can someone find a way to make that time productive and benefit people and places (other than Facebook employee stock options?)

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