I recently spotted a headline claiming that Facebook was losing users. A report was published that indicated they lost 6 million US subscribers in 1 month. There's a little chatter on the blogs about "the decline of Facebook" and that sort of thing, but Facebook has also come out strongly saying that the report is flawed.
This perked my interest so I did a little research and found out the following facts, by generating some Internet usage/traffic reports from public, 3rd part data at Alexa.com
Here's what I see:
Facebook has been trending steadily upwards when you look at it's total "reach" across the whole of global Internet use. This graph means that more people worldwide are being reached by Facebook on a very nice upward trend.
This next graph shows a downward trend for people who access Facebook through a search engine. What I see in this graph is more and more people are going to Facebook directly, and not using Google or Bing to find it because they already know were it is or have a shortcut to it.
This graph shows usage of Facebook's site is steady, and people are staying on it more or less for the same amount of time as always, maybe trending up a little right now.
This graph shows traffic to Facebook is spiking, as more and more people are using Facebook for the same amount of time.
And finally, what I see here is, as the popularity of Facebook increases, more and more people are going to be first time visitors and bounce off the home page a few times before they might actually sign up.
I looked over the data at Alexa and I didn't really see anything that makes me think Facebook is on some kind of huge decline,
anywhere but look over the data yourself, and maybe there's more ways to interpret it...
