[Infowarrior] - Facebook is losing users

[Richard Forno]

(...or in my case, never had them. -- rick)

Facebook is losing users

Report shows losses in key countries like the US and UK
By Dean Wilson
Tue Jun 14 2011, 12:14                 

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2078752/facebook-losing-users

THE JIG MIGHT BE UP for Facebook, which has seen its peak in user signups and is now losing people, according to a report by Inside Facebook.

Facebook now has 687.1 million users, up from the milestone half a billion it recorded in July of last year, but it looks like its phenomenal growth is finally starting to slow, and in some regions the social notworking giant has actually lost users.

Inside Facebook Gold tracks how many Facebook users exist in each country on a monthly basis, and it discovered that during May the US Facebook userbase dropped from 155.2 million to just below 149.4 million.

A fall of 5.8 million users in the space of a month is significant, especially in a key country like the US, but Facebook managed to record overall growth throughout the world of 11.8 million.

The problem for Facebook is that this is lower growth than the 13.9 million in April and the roughly 20 million it gained for each month before that, suggesting a significant slowdown in user uptake across the globe, which could be linked to the drop in users in countries like the US.

The US was not the only country to lose Facebook users. Canada dropped from 18.1 million users to 16.2 million, a drop of 1.52 million. Russia, Norway and the UK have also seen declines of over 100,000 users, suggesting that things might also be beginning to peak in Europe for Facebook.

Despite the figures Inside Facebook found, which are based on Facebook's own advertising tool, the company said that it was still growing in many of these regions.

Some reports back up Inside Facebook's findings, while others show high growth instead, but the consensus generally appears to be that Facebook is not doing quite as well this year compared to 2010. µ