Everybody talks about quitting Facebook, but nobody ever expects anybody to actually do it.
Well, guess what? Six million Facebook users in United States and 1.52 Canadian users may have done it in May, reports Inside Facebook, part the Inside Media research organization.
It's the first time Facebook lost U.S. users in the past year, "falling 155.2 million at the start of May to 149.4 million at the end of it," writes Inside Facebook's Eric Eldon, using data gleaned from the social network's advertising tool. Other countries saw less significant losses as well, with Canada now at 16.6 million and "the United Kingdom, Norway and Russia all posted losses of more than 100,000."
Before all y'all Facebook haters start shooting off guns in your long-planned "'Member MySpace?! I told you it was just a fad!" dance party, please note: This data doesn't mean all these users quit Facebook and deleted their accounts. It probably means many of them haven't logged on in a while.
It could even mean people have abandoned the "secret" account they made to spy on their exes or SOs, or for their dog. Maybe it's government spooks shutting down spy operations or something; bot accounts getting deleted; or people really named Justin Bieber or Kate Middleton being suspended for having the audacity to be born with a famous name.
Or it could just be bugs in Facebook advertising tool, Inside Facebook points out.
Despite the possible losses, "Facebook is still growing towards 700 million users, having reached 687 million monthly actives by the start of June," Inside Facebook reports. "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."
Vincenzo Cosenza's biannual "world map of social networks" provides a striking visual of Facebook's Alexander-like march across the globe. Check out the animated version of the map's growth from 2009 to 2011, and as TechCrunch suggests, "Pay close attention to how many social networks made it to the map in June 2009 compared to June 2011. From 17 to 9."
"Facebook is now the 'leader' in 119 out of 134 countries Cosenza has analyzed (he added Ethiopia and Tanzania this time around)," writes TechCrunch's Robin Wauters. "Since the last update of the world map, Facebook has conquered countries like Syria and Iran, despite struggles against government censorship." Moving forward, "Cosenza posits that The Netherlands and Brazil will be the next countries to “surrender” to Facebook’s steamroll (it’s already happening, in fact)."
What's more, the sudden drop in U.S. Facebook users in May is drastic, but history shows it's not entiredly unexpected. "By the time Facebook reaches around 50 percent 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," Inside Facebook notes.
If Facebook makes the speculated move towards China, where the social network is currently blocked, it could easily hit its goal of 1 billion users — but not without gaining ill will in other countries for compromising with a government that takes a hardline on Internet censorship while also using the Web to monitor its citizens.
More on the annoying way we live now:
- How to turn off Facebook's creepy face recognition
- Mark Zuckerberg kills what he eats
- New York City is Twitter capital of the world
Helen A.S. Popkin goes blah blah blah about the Internet. Tell her to get a real job on Twitter and/or Facebook.