From the archive. First published in June 2017. Rewritten for clarity, with a note on what happened afterwards.
In June 2017 Facebook passed two billion monthly users, a few days after announcing a new mission statement about bringing the world closer together. The number was up from 1.94 billion reported that May.
Where it stands now
Facebook kept growing. The platform reports more than three billion monthly users today, and Instagram passed three billion on its own in September 2025. The predictions that Facebook was dying, which were already a genre in 2017, have not aged well.
The point worth making
Platform scale and page reach have moved in opposite directions for more than a decade, and conflating them is the most common error in this market.
While the user base grew from two billion to over three, organic reach per follower for pages fell from roughly 12 percent in 2013 to around 1.25 percent today, and to around 0.5 percent for pages above 100,000 followers. More people on the platform has not meant more people seeing your posts. It has meant more competition for a feed that did not grow.
What this means for valuation
- Do not price a page on platform growth. The relevant number is what your posts actually reach, not how many people have an account.
- Audience country matters more than audience size. Most of the growth has come from markets where advertisers pay very little, which is precisely why a smaller page with a Western audience outsells a much larger one elsewhere.
- Reach per follower falls as a page grows. That inverse relationship has held since at least 2013 and still holds.
The full picture of how reach declined is in our piece on how Facebook throttled page reach.
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