Facebook, which declined to comment for this story because it is in the so-called quiet period before its initial public offering, said in its prospectus that its figures "may not be directly comparable to those reported by third parties due to differences in the methods used to calculate the metrics." [Small city 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, with rich practical experience and high technical strength, providing you with website SEO optimization service, aiming at "marketing and conversion rate", allowing customers to see intuitive results. Business QQ consultation: 466401604, 8838478 Contact information: 13422475786] Facebook's definition of "active" is unproblematic strange group-buying accounting, and there was no appearance trying to defraud investors. Facebook seems to use "active" as a euphemism for "engaged" rather than how many users are actually using it monthly. Of course, this raises an obvious question: how many users are actually active, using a more traditional definition? In other words, every time you press the "like" button, for example, you are a "active user" on Facebook. Do you have a Twitter feed on your Facebook account? That makes you an active Facebook user too. Do you share music with friends? You're an active Facebook user. If you log into your account and leave a comment on the Huffington Post site through 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. The company acknowledges, "there are inherent challenges in measuring usage across large online and mobile populations around the world," because, for example, "usage on certain mobile devices may automatically update our servers periodically without user-initiated actions, this activity may cause our systems to count such devices as active users on Facebook." Also, the company says, this fictitious usage accounts for less than five percent of the total. In fact, Facebook's "like" button, on third-party sites or through the "Facebook Connect" platform, allows users Facebook to consider them "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 users active if he or she "took an action to share content or activity with his or her Facebook friends or connections via a third party site integrated with Facebook." If you manage to read all 44 pages of Facebook's prospectus, you will find that the company offers a definition of "active user" that might not be what you expect. On the first page of the prospectus where Facebook sells shares to the public, it pins its "monthly active users" at up to 845 million people. The social network reaches an even more impressive number when it comes to "daily active users": 483 million people. Back? "Think about what this means for their monetization of daily users," wrote Brian Sozzi, CEO and director of equity research at Fusion IQ, in his blog. "If they click the 'like' button without going to Facebook that day, they cannot be sold, they don't see any ads, they cannot sell any goods or services. All they do is leverage the entire infrastructure to tell all friends (who may or may not see what they did) that they like something online. Period." In December, Nielsen, which tracks Internet usage, calculated 153 million unique users on the Facebook site monthly in the U.S., while Facebook said in its filing that it had 161 million monthly active users. Assuming Facebook's U.S. traffic accounts for about 19% of its business, that figure is at least 40 million users out of 845 million Facebook defines as "active." These are some big numbers. If it's hard to believe that many people click on facebook.com every day, it's because they aren't. These jaw-dropping numbers should come with an asterisk in between. This is not the first time an internet company's metrics have been called into question. In one particularly prominent case, this column documented last year's group-buying, discovering a funny misleading accounting metric called adjusted consolidated segment earnings, including various revenues but excluding sales costs. The Securities and Exchange Commission raised questions and the company abandoned the measure. Facebook's counting, strangely enough, is actually more transparent than some competitors. Google was recently criticized for disclosing only the number of registered users of the Google+ service, with few people using the service regularly. Twitter was similarly criticized. At least Facebook tried to count only those people who are engaging with the service in some meaningful way. Related thematic articles: EU investigates Samsung's online patent licensing practices; Online marketing checklist: 37 ways to promote your website; Hackers intercept FBI calls with U.K.; As Facebook prepares for its IPO, investors wonder whether Zuckerberg has a... Latest women's perspectives.