This number has always irked me. How many of those are unique? And I don't mean unique accounts, I mean actually unique people.
I did some work in the social gaming space. We would routinely discover people with 5, 10, sometimes 20+ Facebook accounts that would be logged in and actively used in order to "game" social gaming mechanics ("add 10 friends!", "log in 10 days in a row and get a prize!", "complete these offers to get game currency!"). There are businesses on the internet that can get your page thousands of "likes" in the span of hours, by using multiple accounts.
Having a single account was the exception. And even though this was against FB's terms of use, I don't recall anyone, ever, getting banned for it. What would Facebook's incentive be to do so?
On the other hand, the vast majority of facebook users aren't out there trying to game social gaming mechanics, so I can't imagine that the overall number of fake accounts could be huge. A million at the most?
>" so I can't imagine that the overall number of fake accounts could be huge. A million at the most?"
Really? Do you have any evidence to support that? Because my experience working with a game that had about 1MM DAUs at its peak was completely different. The analysis wasn't perfect, because it's very difficult to prove there is no unique user on the other end. But there are behavioral queues. And we determined that 1/4 to 1/3 of the accounts playing our game were fake.
Have you spent much time playing these games? They're hyper competitive. So any mechanics which require or benefit a player by having more friends will be taken advantage of. Need 20 friends to advance past a level? It's far easier to make and use 20 Facebook accounts accounts than it is to spam your friends list for people to play, especially if no one on your list actually plays the game. The whole system was designed to promote this sort of activity. That's why I can't understand why people would be shocked at this. The ruse is good for users (more stuff!), good for the games and good for Facebook (more DAUs!).
Again, it's the industry's dirty little secret: nobody has any incentive to tell people that large numbers of people using their game or application aren't even real. That goes for Facebook, Zynga or any small gaming shop anywhere.
Do you think that they rally 20,000 people to "like" your page? Or do they have a script with many accounts?
The point is, nobody really knows how big of a problem this is. You seem to think it's small; my experience tells me that it's big. Either way, the data advertisers are using to determine spends and ROI is skewed in an undetermined direction.
Edit: Have you ever played World of Warcraft? Do you know how people use characters to store and transfer goods? Depending on the Facebook game, that principle can exist on a very large scale. Except, as opposed to WoW, every storage character is counted as a unique DAU. I would bet my life that any game where an edge can be gained by having multiple accounts has a large multiple account problem.
This number has always irked me. How many of those are unique? And I don't mean unique accounts, I mean actually unique people.
I did some work in the social gaming space. We would routinely discover people with 5, 10, sometimes 20+ Facebook accounts that would be logged in and actively used in order to "game" social gaming mechanics ("add 10 friends!", "log in 10 days in a row and get a prize!", "complete these offers to get game currency!"). There are businesses on the internet that can get your page thousands of "likes" in the span of hours, by using multiple accounts.
Having a single account was the exception. And even though this was against FB's terms of use, I don't recall anyone, ever, getting banned for it. What would Facebook's incentive be to do so?