As Facebook reaches half the internet, can it continue to grow?

Facebook already reaches half of the world’s online population. With it reaching saturation point in the developed world, the average user that it now signs up is likely to be in emerging markets, and thus have a lower disposable income, making them less valuable to the advertisers that Facebook relies on. With much of the world still without internet access, Facebook is surely going to hit a brick wall at some point, it could be argued.

Meanwhile, there are suggestions that the audience that originally made Facebook a household name – teenagers – are embracing new social media platforms , ones that their parents have not joined. The story of MySpace – the social network that Facebook usurped in the mid 2000s – still hangs over the company.

“The key question about social networks is about longevity,” says Ian Maude, a technology specialist at Enders Analysis. “Are they like banks, where customers stay loyal for a lifetime, or like fashion stores, where people hang around for a while before moving on?

“Facebook is different [to MySpace], it’s based on real identities and users connect to people they know in the real world. That’s a much stronger connection.”

Even if there are question marks around Facebook’s future, Mr Zuckerberg is certainly not resting on his laurels. In February, the company spent $19bn acquiring WhatsApp , the smartphone messaging app that presented the biggest threat to its global expansion plans.

More recently, it bought Oculus Rift , a company that develops virtual reality hardware, and Britain’s Ascenta , whose unmanned drones it plans to use to beam internet connections to the two-thirds of the world’s population without them.

On Thursday, the company announced the acquisition of Moves, a smartphone app for tracking physical activity, and partnered with Storyful, a division of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, to increase the prevalence of news stories shared on Facebook.

“I’m even more excited about the next ten years than the last,” Mr Zuckerberg said when Facebook turned a decade old this year. It is the sort of throwaway statement common among bosses. But in this case, Mr Zuckerberg seems to be putting his money where his mouth is.

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