Facebook counts as "active" users who visit its site and mobile site. But it also counts all other categories of people who do not click on facebook.com as "active users." The company considers a user active if he or she "has taken an action to share content or activity with his or her Facebook friends or connections through a third-party website integrated with Facebook." This is not the first time that a metric of an Internet company has been under scrutiny. In one particularly prominent example, this column documented last year how Groupon came up with a funny and misleading accounting measure called Adjusted Consolidated Segment Operating Income, which included various revenues but excluded cost of sales. The Securities and Exchange Commission asked questions and the company dropped the measure. In other words, every time you press the "Like" button, for example, you are an "active user" of Facebook. Do you have a Twitter feed linked to your Facebook account? That makes you an active Facebook user, too. Do you have a friend who shares music? You're an active Facebook user. If you log in to your account and leave a comment on the Huffington Post using Facebook - and your comment is automatically shared on Facebook - you, too, are an "active user," even if you never spend any time on facebook.com. "Think about what that means for their monetization of daily users," wrote Brian Wieser, chief knowledge officer and director of stock research at Pivotal Research Group, in his blog. "If they click a 'Like' button without going to Facebook that day, they cannot be sold, they don't see any ads, they cannot buy any goods or services. All they do is leverage the extensive infrastructure to tell all friends (who may or may not see what they did) that they like something online. Period." The company acknowledged that "there are inherent challenges measuring usage across large populations of people online and mobile around the world," because, for example, "usage on certain mobile devices will automatically update our servers periodically without user engagement behavior, and this activity can cause our systems to count such device-related usage as that of an active Facebook user." Also, the company said, such phantom usage accounts for less than 5 percent of the total. ClosetumblrDiggLinkedInRedditPermalinkTwitter If you managed to read all 44 pages of Facebook's prospectus, you would find that the company offers a definition of an "active user" that might not be what you expect. View all postsArticle toolsE-mailPrintRecommendShare Facebook's counting, curiously, is actually more transparent than some competitors. Google was recently criticized for disclosing only the number of registered users of its Google+ service, which few people use regularly. Twitter has been similarly criticized. At least Facebook tries to count only those people who engage with the service in some meaningful way. [Small town stock market engaged in enterprise website construction, website optimization, website promotion, overall marketing planning and implementation of enterprise e-commerce, has a famous team in SEO industry, with rich practical experience and technical strength, providing you with website SEO optimization service, with "marketing and conversion rate" as the goal, so that customers can see intuitive results. Business QQ consultation: 466401604, 8838478 Contact information: 13422475786 ] Facebook's definition of "active" is not strange enough to raise concerns about group-buying accounting practices, and there is no indication that Facebook is trying to defraud investors. These are some big numbers. If it is hard to believe that many people click on facebook.com every day, that is because they do not. These jaw-dropping numbers should have an asterisk next to them. On the first page of Facebook's prospectus selling stock to the public, it pegs its "monthly active users" at as high as 845 million people. The social network reaches an even more impressive number when it comes to "daily active users": 483 million people. Facebook, which declined to comment for this column because it is in the so-called quiet period before its initial public offering, said its numbers "may differ from estimates published by third parties due to differences in methodology." Of course, that raises an obvious question: How many users are actually active, using a more traditional definition? Forum column Back? In December, Nielsen, which tracks Internet usage, calculated 153 million unique users on Facebook's site in the United States per month, while Facebook said in its filing that it had 161 million monthly active users. Assuming Facebook's United States traffic accounts for about 19 percent of its business, that implies the difference is made up of at least 40 million users out of 845 million that Facebook defines as "active." In fact, Facebook's "Like" button, on third-party sites or through its "Facebook Connect" platform, allows users Facebook seems to be using "active" as shorthand for "engaged" rather than how many users are actually visiting it monthly. Related theme articles: Another chance for Facebook timetable New York Giants' winner Cruz dances into pre-Super Bowl spotlight Comments on this page are aggregated across all categories of SEO software. New article As Facebook prepares for its IPO, investors wonder if Zuckerberg has a twisted business...