14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook’s growth seems unstoppable, or at least it seemed, as a new report by analytics company Hitwise shows that even the giant social network can reach a ceiling. Facebook was the second most visited website in the UK in July and the first in terms of page views. Yet, its share of the total number of page views in the UK is actually diminishing.
“[I]n July [Facebook] accounted for 7.14 % of all UK Internet visits and over half (54.48 %) of all visits to a social networking websites. In terms of total visits it continues to trail Google UK (9.59 % market share in July) and, as we’ve highlighted before, will continue to do so for the foreseeable future,” Robin Goad, Research Director for Hitwise UK, wrote.
“However, using the measure of total page views rather than visits, Facebook is way ahead. As the table below illustrates, the social network accounted for 16.73% of UK page views during July. In other words: last month, 1 in every 6 Internet pages viewed in the UK was a Facebook page,” he added.
With 16.73 percent of the market, Facebook is hardly in a bad spot, few other websites before it can boast this kind of following. Yet, its slice of the entire UK monthly visits to a website has gone down in recent months. Of course, that doesn’t mean that fewer people visit the site, its page view numbers may actually be increasing and the market could be growing faster than the social network.
One explanation for the decline may be that seasonal factors, younger users may spend less time on the site in summer. In other years, this trend would not have been as easy to spot since the site still grew at a huge pace. But now that it is reaching a limit in the number of users it can draw in the UK, any lull in activity is noticeable.