Facebook Traffic from US and Canada Shows Decline

 

Although Facebook is still growing towards 700 million users, having reached 687 million monthly actives by the start of June, ( source  Inside Facebook Gold data service.) However .beyond the overall increase in  numbers, Facebook's traffic across certain key markets have been decling .Facebook lost 6 million users in the U.S. last month, dropping from 155.2 million to 149.4 million. That's the first time U.S. numbers have dropped in more than a year.

It also lost 1.52 million users in Canada, dropping to 16.6 million -- that's an 8% drop --  and 100,000 each in the U.K., Norway, and Russia.Total Facebook users were still up 1.7% thanks to growth in countries where the service got popular later, like Mexico and Brazil.

Most of the new users continue to come from countries that are relatively late in adopting Facebook, as has been the trend for the past year.

But overall growth has been lower than normal for the second month straight, which is unusual.

The company gained 11.8 million more people over May, following 13.9 million over April. In contrast, it grew by at least 20 million new users over the typical month in the past 12; while there have been a few months that have registered lower growth numbers, they have not been back to back.

 Analyzing this drop in numbers , Inside facebook  writes"  Till Facebook reaches around 50% of the total population in a given country (plus or minus, depending on internet access rates in that country), growth generally slows to a halt, as we’ve noted before. So far, Facebook has been able to make up stalls and losses with big gains in heavily-populated developing countries like Mexico, Brazil, India and Indonesia. As you can see in the table above of the ten countries that gained the most users over May, this continues to be the case.