Facebook hits 10 billion photo mark

Written on 15th October 2008                                                                                                              1 COMMENT
Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer

Facebook engineer Doug Beaver published a company blog post today about the fact that users of the wildly popular social networting site have now uploaded over 10 billion photos to the site. And since they apparently actually store four image sizes for each uploaded photo, that’s over 40 billion files. 

Huge numbers indeed, if you consider the fact that it’s only one aspect of Facebook, as it’s not a photo sharing site per se. Caroline McCarthy from CNET’s The Social writes:

To compare, the News Corp.-owned Photobucket, which has a real-time ticker of photos uploaded, stood at slightly less than 6.2 billion photos on Wednesday morning. Flickr, which is owned by Yahoo, hit 2 billion photos just less than a year ago.

On a sidenote, Webshots isn’t talked about in this comparison, and probably for good reason: CNET sold the photo-sharing site to American Greetings for $45 million, having spent about $70 million on acquiring three years ago.

Some more interesting stats released by Beaver:

• 2-3 Terabytes of photos are being uploaded to the site every day
• We have just over one petabyte of photo storage
• We serve over 15 billion photo images per day
• Photo traffic now peaks at over 300,000 images served per second

No wonder they had to borrow an extra $100 million earlier this year to keep up with the staggering growth.