Report: Facebook grows but shrinks during May
by Steven Mostyn - Jun 14 2011, 11:58
Is it all downhill from here? Image: Facebook.
It seems like only yesterday that everyone and their sensationalist monkey were busy trumpeting the rise and rise of Facebook, the world’s leading juggernaut, untouchable, impregnable, social networking service. How things change.
More pointedly, although Facebook moved beyond the point of having half a billion registered users in July of 2010, it would appear the network has peaked at around 680 million users and is now losing momentum at a potentially alarming rate.
That’s according to Inside Facebook, which tracks regional Facebook usage on a nation-by-nation basis and has discovered that Zuckerberg & Co. saw the U.S. user base plunge from 155.2 million to 149.4 million during the month of May. Ouch.
Other regions hit by negative growth include the likes of Canada, which dropped just shy of two million users, and Norway, Russia and the United Kingdom, each of which has lost more than 100,000 users in the last four weeks.
Although it’s highly likely that alarm bells began sounding at Facebook HQ after losing traction in a major contributing market such as the U.S., Facebook still managed to increase its global user base by 11.8 million during May.
That being said, looking at Inside Facebook’s recent figures, last month’s growth of 11.8 million new users falls short of the 13.9 million pulled in during April and the 20 million that signed up during March.
In reacting to Inside Facebook’s study, which looked at information extracted from the social network’s own advertising tools, a spokesperson for the network said such data “provides broad estimates on the reach of Facebook ads” and shouldn’t be relied upon as a source for accurate tracking.
So, panic over then.
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