• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer, January 10, 2011

Previously I wrote about Facebook being the first truly global medium, a fact highlighted by its nearly 600 million members -- just about twice the size of the U.S. population. It's still growing, and it's quite conceivable it will pass one billion members sometime this year -- offering online advertisers reach on a scale never before offered by a single platform. But it's also becoming increasingly clear that Facebook's penetration varies significantly from country to country.

Last week the New York Times noted that where 133 million Americans, or 60% of the U.S. online population, have joined Facebook, the figure for Japan was just two million -- less than 2% of the Japanese online population. In short, Facebook has failed to make real inroads in Japan. The article went on to explain that Japanese tend to prefer social networks which offer more anonymity, like Mixi and Gree.

These stats got me wondering how other nations stack up in Facebook penetration, focusing in on the developing "BRIC" countries -- Brazil, Russia, India, and China. The numbers get a little dicey, since it's hard to find estimates for the online population of many countries, so I decided to reset the comparison on the basis of population alone; in other words, these figures probably reflect both the popularity of Facebook and Internet penetration in general.

Facebook had nine million unique visitors in Brazil in October 2010 -- just 4.7 % of Brazil's 191 million people -- versus 36 million or 18.8 % for Orkut. In Russia Facebook attracted just 4.5 million visitors in October, or 3.2% of the population of 142 million, trailing rivals like Vkontakte.ru, with 27.8 million visitors (19.6%) and Odnoklassniki, with 16.7 million visitors (11.8%) -- which are not only larger but also more fun to say.

On the other hand Facebook pulled into the lead in India in 2010, edging out Orkut as the most visited social networking site last July. But social networks in general still aren't common among the Indian population, reflecting the fact that they're still mostly confined to the small online professional class. In July Facebook attracted 20.9 million visitors, or just 1.7% of India's roughly 1.2 billion people.

Last and least comes China, where Facebook is officially banned -- although Mark Zuckerberg's recent meetings with Chinese officials suggest the company is working to change this. Meanwhile similar Chinese services are springing up, including QQ, with over 300 million members or 22% of the population of 1.34 billion in May 2010, and Kaixin001.com, which boasted about 90 million users or 6.7% in November 2010.