Facebook's UK unique user numbers have dropped for a second month in a row.The fall to 8.3M unique users in February from Decembers 8.9M puts an end to the social network's rocket success. It had previously enjoyed 17 consecutive months of gains to the end of 2007.
Alex Burnmaster, European internet analyst at Nielsen Online, said, The period of phenomenal growth for social networks is over. There's only so much they can grow and they've reached critical mass.
The figures reinforce media agencies' views that social audiences have experienced major swelling through hype but will settle into stable niche audiences.
Charlie McGee, managing partner at MEC Interaction, said...
They are very transient. You can never expect numbers to keep going up. It's interesting to see Facebook has lost users, but I'm not sure if it's going to damage ad sales.
MySpace, which claims to be the world's largest social network with 110M users, also continued to drop in the UK, falling to under 5M unique users in February.The social network model is all about monetising core users so I don't think the shedding of numbers is a bad thing...
If in a few months we see the networks losing a quarter of their users, then they'll be in trouble, but for now this loss is sustainable.
We do look at traffic patterns but we define ourselves by user engagement levels. We look at logins, how many times that user comes to the site a day to check their email, watch a video or change their profile.
