How We Calculated That Three Facebook Users Die Every Minute
By Nathan Lustig on Sep 3 th, with 28 COMMENTS
All Facebook put out an interesting infographic yesterday titled Surprising Facts About Death on Facebook. Our friend Adele McAlear of Death and Digital Legacy blogged about the infographic yesterday as well. All Facebook’s post is really interesting, but I think their stats are way off.
The infographic is really good, except All Facebook says that 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 Facebook passed the 500m user mark. We feel comfortable saying that 375,000 US based Facebook users will die this year and nearly 1.5m will die worldwide. That’s 3 per minute!
Our Methodology
All Facebook’s infographic says that Facebook provided the 200k user death number. I think they are wrong. Not only wrong, but likely wrong by an order of magnitude. We’re really confident in our estimates, so here’s how we calculated them:
Our two data sources were Facebook’s advertising data and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Wonder database. We used Facebook’s own advertising data to figure out that there are currently 133,925,380 US based Facebook users. We created a new ad, then set the targeting to USA and set the age range from Any-Any.
Next, we looked at the CDC’s Wonder database of mortality from 2006. The CDC breaks the population into 13 different age groups and shows how many US citizens are in each age group, along with how many people in each age group die each year. Then, they calculate the death rates for each age group. Here’s the raw data:
These data show that in 2006, there were just over 299 million people in the United States and the overall death rate was 810.4 per 100,000, or .81%. So, for 20-24 year-olds, the population was about 21m and the death rate was .1%.
So now that we have the death rates for each demographic, we need to figure out how many US Facebook users fit into each demographic. We did this by using Facebook’s advertising data again.
So now that we have the death rates in the US and the number of Facebook users in each demographic, we can calculate an estimate of how many Facebook user deaths we can expect this year. Note: we used the lowest death rate for the under 14 group and did not include the death rate for people over 75. We used the death rate for 65-74 for all of the over 65 group since we could not get exact numbers of how many people were over 75 on Facebook. This means that our estimate is likely lower than the actual number.
So there you have it. 385,968 US Facebook users will die this year. If Facebook had the same demographics as the United States, we would expect that 1,084,795 Facebook users would die this year (133m Facebook users X .81% US Death Rate). But Facebook doesn’t have the same demographics, as we’ve clearly shown above. Facebook’s death rate is 35% of the overall population.
What does this all mean?
Q: Facebook users likely more well off than the general population, so won’t will die at a lower rate?
A: It’s possible, but even if you take 10% off of the number, we are still far above the 200k Facebook users that inside Facebook used in their infographic.
Q: So you’re saying 385,000 Facebook users will die this year?
A: No, we are saying 385 US Facebook users will die this year. It does not even include the 370m Facebook users in the rest of the world.
Q: So how many people will die worldwide?
A: If we use the same death rate for the rest of the world that we calculated in the United States (.29%), we can calculate an estimate. Facebook does not give a total worldwide user number, but we know it is over 500m. So let’s use 500m. If we do the math, we get 1.45m Facebook users will die worldwide.
Q: So Facebook claims that 200,000 of their users die each year? How can that be?
A: Unless Facebook’s demographics are way different from what they are publishing via the ad interface or Facebook’s users die at a much lower rate than the general population, the 200k number is way off, likely by an order of magnitude. Facebook has been around for 6 years now, so their estimate is likely WAY off.
Q: So what does this all mean?
A: It means that Facebook has a big problem. Not only do they not know when one of their users dies or what their user wanted done with their Facebook profile after death, they severely underestimate how many of their users die each year. Likely by 1.3m. It’s pretty clear from our research that most people are not memorializing their Facebook profiles. I think it’s likely that this is because simply memorializing a profile in its current form is not what people want.
People want control. They want personalization. They want to be able to delete their entire profile. They want to be able to have someone manage their profile after death. Facebook’s current solution is not sufficient for the vast majority of people. That’s why you need a service like Entrustet if you care what happens to your Facebook profile.
You can nominate a digital executor who will be sure to memorialize your profile or designate an heir who will curate your profile after you die. You can also tell your digital executor to delete your account after you pass away. Check us out for free!
September 03, 2010 at 5:15 pm, Nathan Lustig said:
RT @Entrustet: new blog post: how we calculated that three Facebook users die every minute: http://ow.ly/2zdqy
September 03, 2010 at 5:35 pm, stacey pitsillides said:
RT @Entrustet: new blog post: how we calculated that three Facebook users die every minute: http://ow.ly/2zdqy
September 03, 2010 at 7:46 pm, Jamie Holzhuter said:
Reading http://blog.entrustet.com/2010/09/03/how-we-calculated-that-three-facebook-users-die-every-minute/
September 06, 2010 at 9:46 am, Jamie Holzhuter said:
#goodquestion How many virtual people die every minute? http://bit.ly/bRyUcw
September 06, 2010 at 1:43 pm, More Thoughs on How Many Facebook Users Die Every Year said:
[...] wrote up how we calculated that 3 facebook users die every minute, or about 1.5m Facebook users worldwide, in a post last friday. I was talking a look at the data [...]
September 22, 2010 at 5:42 am, 2morrowKnight said:
Tweeps, for some particular reason, the previous link isn't working. I read it earlier. Here's another related post –> http://bit.ly/dD72UG
September 22, 2010 at 5:42 am, 2morrowknight said:
Tweeps, for some particular reason, the previous link isn't working. I read it earlier. Here's another related post –> http://bit.ly/dD72UG
September 22, 2010 at 5:47 am, Floetry Catnap said:
How We Calculated Three Facebook Users Die Every Minute –> http://bit.ly/dD72UG /@2morrowknight
September 23, 2010 at 10:15 am, Kathy Meyer said:
How We Calculated That Three #Facebook Users Die Every Minute – http://bit.ly/dD72UG RT @2morrowknight
September 23, 2010 at 10:15 am, Harsh Ajmera said:
Three #Facebook Users Die Every Minute – http://bit.ly/dD72UG RT @2morrowknight @2cre8
September 23, 2010 at 9:32 pm, A.R.Karthick said:
Three #Facebook Users Die Every Minute! [Stats] – http://bit.ly/dD72UG | RT @2morrowknight @2cre8 @Harsh_Ajmera
September 27, 2010 at 10:55 am, ʍìӀɑղɑ ɾվɑղ said:
Three #Facebook Users Die Every Minute – http://bit.ly/dD72UG RT @2morrowknight @2cre8 @Harsh_Ajmera
September 27, 2010 at 2:29 pm, Dian ☀ said:
RT @rM1L Three #Facebook Users Die Every Minute – http://bit.ly/dD72UG RT @2morrowknight @2cre8 @Harsh_Ajmera
September 27, 2010 at 2:37 pm, vinay said:
RT @JustDiii: RT @rM1L Three #Facebook Users Die Every Minute – http://bit.ly/dD72UG RT @2morrowknight @2cre8 @Harsh_Ajmera
September 28, 2010 at 5:30 am, Social Side Media said:
Three #Facebook Users Die Every Minute – http://bit.ly/dD72UG RT @2morrowknight @2cre8 @Harsh_Ajmera @rM1L @JustDiii
September 28, 2010 at 11:48 am, PAKMAN said:
Three #Facebook Users Die Every Minute – http://bit.ly/dD72UG RT @2morrowknight @2cre8 @Harsh_Ajmera @rM1L
September 28, 2010 at 11:53 am, Muhammad Wasif Javed said:
FB –> RIP – ;P @FarrukhSiddiqui: Three #Facebook Users Die Every Minute – http://bit.ly/dD72UG RT @2morrowknight @2cre8 @Harsh_Ajmera @rM1L
September 28, 2010 at 11:59 am, Maahrukkh said:
RT @FarrukhSiddiqui: Three #Facebook Users Die Every Minute – http://bit.ly/dD72UG RT @2morrowknight @2cre8 @Harsh_Ajmera @rM1L
September 28, 2010 at 1:30 pm, Oluva Maria Hojgaard said:
Three #Facebook Users Die Every Minute – http://bit.ly/dD72UG /via @2morrowknight @2cre8 @Harsh_Ajmera @rM1L @JustDiii @SocialSideMedia
October 31, 2010 at 11:13 pm, The Digital Beyond – Have you prepared an exit strategy for your digital assets? : Dave's World said:
[...] blogs continue to accelerate with each generation. Pair that with the fact that Facebook has over 280,000 people checking out each year – for [...]
November 16, 2010 at 4:59 pm, lieselolson said:
How many Facebook users die every minute. How depressing…and interesting. http://ow.ly/3aGEu
November 16, 2010 at 5:42 pm, T.J. said:
RT @lieselolson: How many Facebook users die every minute. How depressing…and interesting. http://ow.ly/3aGEu
November 23, 2010 at 5:03 pm, 247,000 Bloggers Will Die This Year in the United States said:
[...] published our methodology and now it’s become such a common statistic that other entities have appropriated it as their [...]
December 30, 2010 at 5:21 pm, 2010 Recap: Entrustet | Capital Entrepreneurs said:
[...] also calculated that three Facebook users die every single minute, a stat that has been published and blogged about all over the Internet. We’ve been featured [...]
January 10, 2011 at 10:17 pm, How to Talk to Media and Get Quoted in the Press said:
[...] mistake or are nervous, only a small audience will notice. # 2. Get 1 go-to stat. Ours is three Facebook users die every single minute and Facebook doesn’t know who they are or what they wanted done with their accounts. With [...]
January 17, 2011 at 10:12 am, 408,000 US Facebook Users Will Die in 2011 and Other Interesting Facebook Data said:
[...] just updated our estimate of US Facebook users who will pass away this year and it’s up another 23,000 from our last estimate. The last time we published an estimate, [...]
January 20, 2011 at 2:14 pm, Nathan Lustig said:
@byanofsky this one's our methodology http://ow.ly/3H8Fx and another one on how many photos deceased users leave behind http://ow.ly/3H8Hm
February 10, 2011 at 6:57 am, | Digital Assets :: Epilawg said:
[...] Now it’s 2011. Take a look at your life. You probably use your computer for 4-6 hours per day and are constantly checking email, taking digital photos and interacting online. Facebook has over 600 million users and there are over 150 million blogs worldwide. Americans upload 3 billion photos to the Internet each day and send billions of emails. And it’s not just young people. 75% of the US population now uses the Internet on a daily basis and 98% of Internet users over the age of 70 use email at least once per month. In fact, we’ve estimated that three Facebook users die every single minute! [...]