Facebook has been growing for so long and by so much that it’s hard to imagine it ever slowing down. Yet that’s precisely what happened last month in the US where the site added just 320,000 new users from the May. What’s more, it may very well be that the site is losing a significant number of users, especially in the key 18 to 44 years demographic.
According to data gathered by Inside Facebook, June was a very slow month for the social network in the US. While more than 300,000 new users is nothing to scoff at, it pales in comparison to the users it lured in the previous month. 7.8 million more people used Facebook in May in the US than they did in April, a sizable chunk even for a country with more than 120 million Facebook users.
There are two possible explanations for the sudden slowdown. One would be that this is the result of the privacy fiasco Facebook went through, again, in the previous month which may have stopped new users from signing up or spurred existing ones to quit. Another explanation would be that this is just an error in the data Inside Facebook uses. Since it does not have access to direct visitors data, no one outside Facebook has, it uses ad data Facebook provides to put together the monthly reports.
Assuming that this is not a glitch, it would be quite a loss in momentum for the social network. But considering that Facebook’s numbers are nearing the number of Internet users in the US, there is bound to be some slowdown at some point, even a decrease in active users.
Overall, more users joined Facebook in the US last month than left, but there is very interesting dip for those between 18 and 44 years, especially for those aged 26 to 34. Facebook had at least 250,000 fewer active users in these age groups in June.
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