Facebook reaches 1.59 billion people globally and 100 million hours of daily video watch time

Facebook announced that they have reached  1.59 billion people globally and 100 million hours of daily video watch time on their platform.

Making the announcement through his Facebook Page, Mark Zuckerburg CEO and Founder, Facebook, said, “We just announced our quarterly results and shared an update on our community’s progress to connect the world. Our community now has more than 1.59 billion people. More than 1 billion people use Groups. Almost 1 billion people use WhatsApp. More than 19 million people who previously had no internet access are now connected through Internet.org.”

According to the results, there are 1 billion monthly Facebook users on Groups, up from 925 million at the close of Q3. 80 million people use Facebook’s stripped down app Facebook Lite for the developing world’s slow connections, up from 50 million at the end of Q3. 500 million users are on Events, up from 450 million in July, and they created 123 million events in 2015.

Facebook has 2.5 million advertisers and 50 million small businesses on Pages up from 45 million last quarter. Users are leaving billions of comments on these pages, which bodes well for Facebook’s plan to make Messenger the new way people communicate and complain to businesses.

“In 2015 people came together in many different ways on Facebook. We celebrated happy moments, from the Indian Super League to the release of Star Wars. Millions of people rallied to support Nepal after the earthquake, France after the Paris attacks and all those affected by the refugee crisis. And every day, hundreds of millions of people just used Facebook to connect with loved ones,” added Zuckerburg.

With 100 million hours of daily video watch time Facebook is also becoming a serious competitor to YouTube for video viewing, it’s building ways to attract users in the developing world and offering more ways to share than just the News Feed.