Facebook suffers first drop in British users
Facebook, the Internet social networking site, has suffered its first drop in British users in 17 months, according to data from web monitoring firm Nielsen Online.
The study said that since July 2006, Facebook had 17 successive monthly increases in Britain but while 8.9 million people here used the site in December 2007, 8.5 million visited in January this year — a five percent fall.
But Facebook’s overall audience is still 712 percent higher than at the same point 12 months ago and nine percent higher than three months ago, it added.
Alex Burmaster, a European Internet analyst at Nielsen Online, said the figures, which showed a downward trend for most leading social network sites, were to be expected because of their rapid early growth.
“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,” he said.
“It was inevitable that the early growth rates couldn’t be sustained and the larger networks have been plateauing over the last few months.”
MySpace was the second most popular social networking site in Britain, with five million visitors in January — nine percent down on the same period last year. It lost 14 percent in the last quarter.
Bebo, in third, had 4.1 million users last month — 53 percent more than in January 2007, but eight percent down in the three months from October 2007 to the end of last month.
Nielsen Online’s data came from technology fitted to 40,000 British computers to measure on- and off-line Internet activity.
