Facebook Growing by 600,000 User per Day

: Image via CrunchBase, source unknown

It was just at the beginning of December that Facebook surpassed 130 million monthly active users. Today, that number is up to 140 million.

While Facebook has been growing at approximately 300,000 - 400,000 active users per day for most of the 4th quarter, their growth rate has increased in big way lately...to 600,000 or maybe as high as 700,000 new users each day.

At this rate of growth, Facebook could add up to 20 million new users in December and reach the 200 million mark by March or April. Remember, however, that about 70% of that growth is happening outside the U.S.

Facebook also seems to be gaining on Google in one aspect...

According to the most recent global data from comScore, which is for October, people spent 33.9 billion minutes on Facebook (up 19 percent from September), compared to 41.6 billion minutes on Google (up 3.6 percent) and 18.5 billion on MySpace (down 2.5 percent). Yahoo is still heads and shoulders above everybody else with 120 billion minutes. And in terms of actual visitors, Google still has nearly four times as many monthly visitors worldwide as Facebook.

Here in the good ol' U.S. of A., however, the gap between FB and Google is a lot more interesting. ComScore reports that in November, people spent 8 billion minutes on Facebook during the month, versus 8.5 billion minutes for Google.