27/06/2011

Facebook: The Global Power Buster?

The Facebook statistics look impressive to some and perhaps worrying to others.  How could 500 million people spend 23 hours of every month browsing the Facebook website? That is a whopping 700 billion minutes per month. 


At ClickTell, as part of a large research and Business Analytics project we have been studying the business model driven sustainability of social networking sites and the short and long term Return On Investment prospects for investors. Faced with the Facebook data, we reframed the above statistics and asked a number of different questions, one of which simply was: What are the implications of these statistics on, of all things, the global power consumption?

Our calculations estimate* the annual consequential user specific power consumption to be 28000 billion watt hours. Put another way, the global Facebook users’ power consumption over a twelve month period is equivalent to powering one million working 50-watt light bulbs constantly for a period of 64 years. 

And how does this level of power consumption compare to the annual electric power consumption of, for example a country? Using the latest available figures (2008), the combined power consumption** of Jamaica, Kenya, Haiti, Latvia, Nepal, Malta and Brunei was less than our estimate for the annual global Facbook users’ power consumption.

These jaw dropping figures are not necessarily unique to Facebook. We believe other organizations whether social networking or not will benefit from reframing the “picture” they hold of their organization. 

At ClickTell, we believe that in the not too distant future and before the time when energy rationing may become the norm, Governments of the world will inevitably have to perform a “true” cost/benefit analysis of such services.  On the basis of this, difficult decisions would have to be made; decisions that would by today’s standards sound most undemocratic.

Please contact ClickTell to find out how we can help reframe your data and re-engineer your business model.


* For a "near-worst-case" scenario where all users use a desktop PC. Total power consumption for PC, Monitor, Router and Speaker(s) assumed to be 200 W. Note: In these calculations we have not accounted for the power consumption resulting from the running of the Facebook’s own operations and the Internet Access Network. 

** Electric power consumption measures the production of power plants and combined heat and power plants less transmission, distribution, and transformation losses and own use by heat and power plants.

12 comments:

Pascal said...

Who would have thought…? A perfect example of how small things can add up to become a huge monster. Thoroughly interesting.

FaceBookFan said...

ALL THOSE LIGHTS. ALL THOSE YEARS.
Just for me to TYPE a few mostly inconsequential words? I am amazed.

J_Rose said...

You must have had a heck of a traffic coming to your blog. I just did a Google search on the term “global power buster” and who should come right at the top? – Your blog.
Did Clicktell coin the term?

iPhone Application Developers said...
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Anonymous said...

The amount of energy available for use on the planet is more than we could ever hope to use. We would suffocate in our own waste heat long before we could consume it all. And that's assuming we're using relatively clean power, such as solar, wind, nuclear, geothermal, hydro, wave, etc. The use of the energy, itself, produces waste.

There will come a time where the input energy side of the equation will be cheap, and the output waste side will be where the substantial cost is. It's inevitable.

Rich Young said...

I want to live in that world!

Anonymous said...

Your Blog must be hurting Facebook! I am a return visitor and today noticed that the link to your Facebook statistics (on the first line of your blog) no longer takes you to the stat page that used to have all the Facebook's own statistcs. It looks as if they now redirect the old link ( www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics ) to http://newsroom.fb.com/. I guess that is one way of Facebook trying to hide their own stats.

Pascal

ClickTell Consulting said...

Very interesting. Thank you for letting us know.

We have now changed the URL - so the statistics link will now take you to an official Google snapshot of the page as it appeared on 28 Jan 2012. From here you will be able to see the original Facebook statistics some of which were used in our calculations.

ClickTell Blog Team.
http://www.clicktell.com/#!contact

Sandra said...

A refreshing piece of research. Thank you for sharing. it really puts things into perspective...

Emma said...

I guess the investors you did this work for are extremely happy given that you most likely saved them millions of dollars. Have you seen the Facebook share prices recently? Can it drop any further? Great work. i wish I had seen this post earlier....

Anonymous said...

Sorry to have to tell you guys but the cached version of the statistics (on the first line of your blog)has now also disappeared. Do you have another link taking readers to a cached version of the original facebook statistics? The one facebook has taken down....
Thanks

ClickTell Consulting said...

We have now replaced the broken link with a new working link from Archive-it.
ClickTell Blog Team.
http://www.clicktell.com/#!contact