Tech & Biz

Facebook loses 400K UK users

by Jordan Yerman | February 21, 2008 at 11:37 am

511 views | 10 Recommendations | 4 comments

After nearly a year and a half[ of steady growth in the UK, Facebook is experiencing a slump: 400,000 fewer unique users accessed the site in January than in December of last year.

Facebook has suffered its first fall in UK users, with a 5% drop between December and January, according to new figures.

However, Facebook still had 8.5 million unique users in January and remains the most popular social networking website in the UK, according to Nielsen Online, the internet research company behind the results.

And Facebook's nearest rival, MySpace, also saw a 5% drop in UK traffic between December and January, according to Nielsen Online.

MySpace ranked second in terms of UK social networking websites in January, with 5 million unique users, while Bebo, which saw users drop by 2% month on month, was ranked third with 4.1 million.

The slide is very bad news for Facebook. Rapid user growth is all it has to show for its massive investment in servers, and now it looks like even that story is evaporating. The only company bringing in significant revenue from Facebook is Rackable Systems, its hardware provider.

The news, whilst bad for Facebook, isn't necessarily a doomsday scenario: indeed, many have simply overvalued Facebook, which breaks down somewhat often despite having only three major user-side components (media upload, privacy settings, messaging); alomst all development on the side is done by third parties for their plug-in apps.

Despite the dip, Facebook has grown phenomenally in the U.K. (and just about everywhere else) over the past year. Nielsen statistics say that even with the December-January drop, the site has grown 712 percent in the U.K. since the same period a year earlier.

Last year, Facebook overtook both MySpace and Bebo as the most popular social-networking site in the U.K. In the U.S., MySpace remains at the top, with Facebook in second place and Bebo lagging behind.

The question, though, is beyond that of a mere horse-race: what keeps people coming back? What do they want from a social networking site? How are developers keeing users from getting bored or alienated?

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BigT

flagged this story as Good Stuff

at 13:37 on February 21st, 2008

Maybe Facebook has seasons just like every other business. More people are off in December and planning more parties so they will spend more time on the site then. January is a crudy month and people aren't in the best of moods - so talking to friends online might not be on the top of everyone's list.

BigT

at 13:38 on February 21st, 2008

I still think that social networking sites, as they are currently situated, is going to change dramatically during the next decade.

Jordan Yerman

at 13:52 on February 21st, 2008

What I find with Facebook is a feeling that my personal info is getting factory-farmed, which many users are willing to put up with if they can get cool toys in return... but Facebook isn't really developing their own cool tools. They provide the soil in which those apps take root, but even that will change soon. I agree with you that social networking will change, and I believe that to be dependent on advancements in mobile browsing and phone/PC media sharing and integration.

Nicole Billard

at 13:44 on February 21st, 2008

Now that just about everybody and their dog is on it (literally), it's going to just run out of new people that are interested. It's also caused it's fair share of marital troubles and e-stalking concerns... maybe people are just getting Face-bored, as I do periodically... there's only so many pictures of 'baby's first snow storm, baby's first cheerio, baby's first (insert random action here)' I can handle. when a new generation gets old enough to type, we'll see more users join up.