Facebook 'suffers December traffic dip' as it reaches saturation point
Facebook saw a drop in its British audience of 600,000 in December, according to a web traffic measurement firm, prompting renewed suggestions it has reached saturation point.
Facebook's UK audience slid 1.86 per cent in December, said SocialBakers,
which measures traffic on social networks for advertisers.
It remained by far the biggest social networking service, with more than 33
million British visitors, or 53 per cent of the market. The way the figures
are calculated means members who access their account from more than one
device are counted separately on each computer, smartphone or tablet,
however.
It places Britain among Facebook's most developed markets, second only to the
United States, where its 169 million users amount to 54 per cent market
penetration.
Like most websites Facebook normally experiences a slowdown in traffic over
the festive period as people unplug from the internet. Among Facebook's top
10 biggest markets, Britain was the only one where the number of visitors
actually fell.
Social networking observers have long expected the service to reach saturation
point at around 50 per cent, and have seized on SocialBakers' December data
as supporting evidence. Facebook's growth curve has been slowing
for several years.
SocialBakers chief executive Jan Rezab agreed Facebook was probably at
saturation point in Britain but warned against seeing the December data as
evidence it had begun to go backwards. He noted that 15 per cent of the
population are under 13 years old and not allowed on Facebook and 16.5 per
cent are in the over-65 age bracket, which accounts for only 4 per cent of
the 33 million British members.
"This effectively means that UK is inflecting in terms of numbers at near
full penetration on Facebook," he said.
"I can't imagine their fans could grow by 10–20M new users, although this
depends if they allow teens under 13 on the platform and furthermore largely
depends on their mobile adoption."
Mr Rezab added that the impact of the Christmas season on Facebook traffic was
hard to assess because the rapid growth of social networks in recent years
had made it difficult to compare years.
"The monthly active user count is statistically vulnerable to more casual
users of the platform, users that don't use it that often and might fall out
of the 30-day range from time to time... my grandpa might sometimes not be
an active user on Facebook, even though he is using it," he said
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