Proving that there is still room to grow in that country

Jul 14, 2010 14:21 GMT  ·  By

Everybody loves a good controversy, but many times things get blown out of proportion, knowingly or not. Case in point is Facebook’s latest privacy fiasco that prompted a lot of people to vow to quit the site. The interest in the story has waned recently and, it seems, so did the critics’ vigor. And if you’re wondering how the public at large feels about it, comScore has just released the traffic numbers for June which show Facebook gaining 11 million new users in the US in the last month alone.

In fact, it was the single biggest monthly leap in the past year. Facebook has now reached a record 141 million users in the US, up from 130 million in May also a record beater. Facebook’s growth in the already saturated market has been accelerating in recent months and the social network is getting close to being the largest website in the US, topping Google sites. The search engine got 179 million visitors in May in the US across all of its online properties.

Facebook has effectively doubled its audience in the US in the past year, growing from 77 million unique visitors in June last year. It had slightly over 110 million visitors at the beginning of the year. Worldwide, Facebook is approaching 500 million monthly active users and may have already crossed that mark, though the social network hasn’t released any numbers in recent months. While most of the growth, after a certain point, was though to come from international markets, it looks like there’s room to grow in the US as well.

For comparison, both MySpace and Twitter have seen little growth in the US in the past year. While MySpace’s poor performance was to be expected, Twitter numbers can be misleading. The majority of its users now connect via desktop or mobile apps and not through the website, which is what comScore measures. [via Mashable]