Facebook Sees First Drop In Unique Users
Facebook has seen its UK monthly unique users figure fall by 5%, from 8.9 million visitors in December 2007, to 8.5 million in January 2008, according to Nielsen Online.
This represents the first fall for the site, which is still ranked number one and has an audience 712% higher than it was a year ago.
MySpace, ranked number two, also suffered a drop in unique visitors, down 9% to five million over the past 12 months, and 5% down since December.
However, teenage social networking site Bebo, ranked number three, saw an increase of 53% in unique visitors over the past year to 4.1 million, despite seeing a 2% fall in audience numbers since December last year.
Nielsen Online has been recording the number of monthly unique users visiting Facebook since July 2006, when the social networking website’s UK audience first became large enough to be regularly measured by the company’s research panel.
“Just as one swallow doesn’t make a summer, so one month of falling audiences doesn’t spell the decline of Facebook or social networking, said Alex Burmaster, European internet analyst at Nielsen Online.
“However, most of the leading social networks are less popular in the UK than they were a year ago. It was inevitable that the early growth rates couldn’t be sustained and the larger networks have been plateauing over the last few months.
“Growth amongst the big players looks to be more about getting people from their competitors not attracting new people to social networking. However, real growth potential lies in the niche networks – those based on a particular lifestyle or interest, such as travel, music, wealth or business.”
Nielsen Online only measures website traffic based on a panel of UK users at home and work – it does not cover usage in schools, universities and internet cafes.
Other online traffic research firms, such as comScore, do include users outside work and home, and as a result their unique user figures for individual websites tend to be significantly higher.
However, at MediaTel Group’s recent ‘Future of Online’ seminar, panellists expressed the view that whilst social networking is here to stay, the dramatic growth the sites have experienced over the past few years will settle, and marketers and advertisers will have to discover the best ways to capitalise on the format (see Social Networking Growth To Settle).
Yesterday, it was revealed that Owen Van Natta, Facebook’s chief revenue officer, will be leaving the company next month after a short tenure (see Senior Facebook Exec To Leave).
The company is also rolling out non-English language versions of the social networking site in the coming weeks as part of an ambitious overseas expansion strategy in 2008 (see Facebook To Roll-Out Non-English Language Sites).
Nielsen Online: www.nielsen-online.com