285,000+ US Facebook Users Will Die This Year
By Nathan Lustig on Mar 14 th, with 5 COMMENTS
Jesse gave his presentation People Die, Profiles Don’t at South By Southwest yesterday and we got a great reaction. The most tweeted about portion was our stat that over 285,000 American Facebook users will pass away this year. We calculated this number using Facebook’s own stats and US Government data provided by the US Census and the Centers for Disease Control.
We were able to get exact numbers of Facebook users broken down by demographic using Facebook’s advertising interface and then we were able to find death rates provided by the US Government broken down by demographic as well. After that, we multiplied the death rate per demographic by the number of Facebook users in each group and got a total.
We believe that this number may even under represent Facebook deaths because there at around 6m Facebook users that do not fit into the advertising demographic options because they are under 13 or over 65. We used 1m as our estimate of users over the age of 65, which we think is probably low and put the other 5m into the under 13 bracket, which has a very low death rate.
If you use Facebook’s stats that show that Facebook has over 400m active users and extrapolate the death rates for the rest of the world using US stats, then over 1.14m Facebook users worldwide will die in 2010.
It’s not just Facebook. We believe that this number shows that companies already face a large problem about what to do with digital assets when their users die. Facebook users have many other digital assets, so you can use Facebook as a proxy to show that hundreds, if not thousands of companies have to deal with this problem each year.
- Tags:
- Death Rates · Digital Assets · Entrustet Stats · Facebook · sxsw
March 19, 2010 at 6:12 pm, Entrustet HIWI Blog › What Happens to Your Social Media When You Die? – NBC 15 Madison Video said:
[...] and talks about Entrustet’s presentation at South By Southwest last week, including our stat 285,000 US based Facebook users will die in 2010. This was written by Nathan Lustig. Posted on Friday, March 19, 2010, at 6:12 pm. Filed under [...]
April 12, 2010 at 7:19 pm, Entrustet HIWI Blog › How Many of Your Company’s Users Will Need Entrustet This Year? said:
[...] South By Southwest, the most tweeted about part of Jesse’s presentation called People Die, Profiles Don’t, was our stat that 285,000+ US based Facebook users would pass away this year. We calculated this [...]
July 19, 2010 at 4:20 pm, Ghost Profiles: 375,000 American Facebook Users Will Pass Away This Year said:
[...] users will pass away this year and over 1.5m will pass away worldwide, a number that’s risen by almost 100k since March when we calculated our first estimate at South By Southwest. It’s a huge problem for [...]
July 21, 2010 at 9:29 am, Facebook and Death: It’s not just a Facebook Problem said:
[...] we first started working on this problem, you couldn’t find anything on Google after searching for 30 minutes. Now there’s [...]
September 03, 2010 at 11:48 am, How We Calculated That Three Facebook Users Die Every Minute said:
[...] only 200,000 Facebook users die each year. At South By Southwest in March, we estimated that 285,000 US based Facebook users would pass away this year and we recently updated our estimate for both US based Facebook users and international users when [...]