After the
whole Insta-gate incident where we saw a lot of back and forth
about whether Facebook-owned, popular photo sharing app Instagram’s was losing
users, today a report has come out that claims user attrition at an even bigger
target: Facebook itself.
According to
an article in the Guardian, the social network lost some 600,000 users
in December in the UK, the sixth-biggest market for Facebook by subscribers.
Using numbers from the analytics firm Socialbakers,
the Guardian links the fall to speculation that the UK had reached a Facebook
saturation point. (As of today, Socialbakers puts the decline even higher,
at 946,000.)
With Facebook
one day away from unveiling some new product news that has people speculating
about big moves in mobile and other new products, the company has been quick to respond
to dismiss the report.
The main
reason, Facebook says, is that Socialbakers’ data is being gathered using
Facebook’s advertising tool — Socialbakers is primarily a marketing partner
that sells its data to brands that use Facebook to market themselves — but this
does not always provide a complete picture of the full set of users.
“From time to
time, we see stories about Facebook losing users in some regions,” Facebook
noted in an emailed statement. “Some of these reports use data extracted from
our advertising tool, which provides broad estimates on the reach of Facebook
ads and isn’t designed to be a source for tracking the overall growth of
Facebook. We are very pleased with our growth and with the way people are
engaged with Facebook – more than 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in
any given day.”
Jan Rezab, the
founder and CEO of Socialbakers, was quick also to put some air between that
story and his company, and he describes it like this: among the users who
do not always get counted in the ad tool are those reading Facebook on mobile
or at work. The ad tool divides people up by region, but because these two sets
of users are by nature moving around (work may be in one place, like Washington
D.C., and home in another, like Virginia) counting them becomes ambiguous.
Indeed, even when Facebook announced its 1 billion user milestone, the user
counts based on the ad tool only registered 940 million.
Facebook gets
around this by regularly reshuffling its data, but that also means that the
December numbers used by the Guardian are actually from November. So if you
think the report might be linked to Facebook’s privacy changes, as this article
in the UK’s Daily Mail based on the Guardian report implies, then that
is incorrect. ”From a privacy point of view there is nothing here,” Rezab
says.
He does note,
however, that the Guardian article accurately notes that the UK market is one
of the most saturated for Facebook. Socialbakers says puts Facebook penetration for the UK at nearly 53% of the
country’s population and 62% of all Internet users. “The market is definitely
reaching a saturation point,” he says.
In a blog post the company has now put up in response to the
Guardian article, Rezab also notes that in fact 62% may be the upper limit at
the moment. “About 15% of people in UK are under 13 years old [and]
therefore ‘not allowed’ on Facebook; 16.5% of people in UK are older than 65
and typically not on Facebook (only 4% of 65+ year olds out of the 33M are on
Facebook in UK).”
The UK is the
sixth-largest market for Facebook worldwide, with 32.8 million users, growing by
over 2.1 million over the last six months. In that context, even if 600,000 was
an accurate number, it’s still a very small count if you consider that there
are regular fluctuations. “I would give it a week or two to reshuffle again,”
Rezab said. “Holiday traffic is likely to account for bigger growth.” [TechCrunch]
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