Le Web: Facebook Connect now reaches 60 million people on 80,000 sites
by Kim-Mai Cutler on December 9, 2009 at 7:31 pm
Facebook just updated stats on Connect — its effort to bring social functionality to sites and apps across the web. Facebook Connect now reaches 60 million users and 80,000 sites (that’s up from the 15,000 announced earlier this fall.)
“We don’t aspire to be only a web site,” said Ethan Beard, director of the Facebook Developer Network. “We aspire to be a technology that allows people to connect people with the things they care about.”
Beard gave a few prominent examples of how Connect has helped drive traffic to partners. Huffington Post, which launched Social News earlier this year, got a 500 percent increase in referrals and 50 percent boost to comments and doubled its user base.
Beard also pointed to Facebook’s rapid growth overseas — two years ago, 70 percent of Facebook’s users came from within the U.S. Now 70 percent come from abroad.
