Closetumblrdigglinkedinredditpermalinktwitter Twitter If you happen to read all 44 pages of Facebook's prospectus, you will find that the company provides a definition of "active user" that is probably not what you expect. These are some big numbers. If it seems hard to believe that many people click on facebook.com every day, it's because they don't. These staggering numbers should have asterisks next to them. Facebook, which declined to comment on this column because it is in the so-called quiet period before its initial public offering, says its numbers "will differ from estimates published by third parties due to methodological differences." In other words, every time you press the "Like" button, for example, you are one of Facebook's "active users." Do you have a Twitter feed in your Facebook account? That makes you an active Facebook user, too. Do you ever share music with friends? You're an active Facebook user. If you log into your account and use Facebook to leave comments on Huffington Post using Facebook - and your comments are automatically shared on Facebook - you, too, are an "active user," even if you never spend any time on facebook.com. Facebook's counting, oddly enough, 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 who engage with the service in some meaningful way. The company acknowledges, "There are inherent challenges measuring usage across large online and mobile populations around the world," because, for instance, "Use on certain mobile devices may automatically update our servers periodically without user-initiated action, and this activity may cause our systems to count such devices as active Facebook users." Also, the company says, this phantom usage accounts for less than five percent of the total. On the first page of its prospectus to sell stock to the public, Facebook pegs its "monthly active users" at up to 845 million people. The social site reaches an even more impressive quantity when it comes to "daily active users": 483 million people. This is not the first time an Internet company's metrics have come under scrutiny. In one particularly prominent example, this column documented last year how Groupon came up with a funny-sounding misleading accounting metric called Adjusted Consolidated Segment Operating Income that included various kinds of revenue but excluded cost of sales. The Securities and Exchange Commission asked questions and the company abandoned the measure. Facebook appears to be using "active" as a euphemism for "engaged" rather than how many users are actually logging in monthly. Of course, this raises an obvious question: how many users are actually active, using a more traditional definition? ["Xiaocheng Stock Market is engaged in enterprise website construction, website optimization, website promotion, overall marketing planning and implementation of enterprise e-commerce, owns a famous team in the SEO industry, has rich practical experience and high technical strength, and provides website SEO optimization services for you, with 'marketing and conversion rate' as the goal, letting customers see intuitive results."] Forum Column "Think about what this means for their monetization of daily users," wrote Brian Solis, CEO and Director of Equity Research Fusion IQ, on his blog. "If they click the 'Like' button without going to Facebook that day, they can't be sold, they don't see any ads, they can't 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) what they like online. Period." Back? Facebook's definition of "active" is strange, but it's not the same kind of deceptive accounting that Groupon tried to pull off, and Facebook isn't trying to defraud investors. In fact, Facebook's "Like" button, on third-party sites or through the "Facebook Connect" platform, allows users In December, Nielsen, which tracks Internet usage, calculated 153 million unique users on the Facebook site per month 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 means the discrepancy is at least 40 million users out of 845 million that Facebook defines as "active." Facebook counts users who go to its website and mobile site as "active." But it also counts all other categories of people who don't click on facebook.com as "active users." The company considers a user active if he or she "took an action to share content or activity with his or her Facebook friends or connected via third-party websites integrating Facebook." Related thematic articles: As Facebook prepares for its IPO, investors wonder if Zuckerberg has a twisted store Will website promotion help your bottom line? To get the best free website promotion Get a word to describe Apple in China Search engine optimization. Quality loyal search engine optimization consultant website promotion