Latest Data on Facebook’s US Growth by Age and Gender – October 1, 2009

We’ve been keeping track of Facebook’s self-reported demographic statistics on the US market for a while now, and here’s the latest update for October 1, 2009. While Facebook says these stats, provided to advertisers, are not necessarily real time, they do give us a sense of how Facebook is growing.

On the whole, Facebook’s US audience grew by 8.6% in September to 88.3 million uniques (compare to latest data from Quantcast, Compete, and comScore). Here’s how Facebook’s gender and sex numbers break down as of today:

(Note: about 5% of users do not report either gender or age, and are not included in this chart.)

Where did the growth come from? Primarily from younger audiences. Females 18-25 led Facebook’s demographic categories this month, adding over 700,000 monthly active users to over 12.8 million. In addition, women over 45 showed strong growth, while increases in males over 35 were lower.


However, on the whole, we see that Facebook is still growing most quickly percentage-wise amongst users over 45 – an interesting demographic trend that started earlier this year. Anecdotally, more Americans are using Facebook for intergenerational communication today than ever before.


Overall, nearly 50% of Facebook users in the US today are over 35, and nearly one-fifth of all US Facebook users are over 45. Most of America’s biggest brand advertisers are working with Facebook now, and it’s clear that they’re reaching users across the age spectrum.