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Facebook Popularity On the Decline

by Tim Stevens on February 25, 2008 at 09:53 AM

Facebook Popularity Declining in U.S.

In what could be a harbinger of things to come -- the slow and painful death of the social networking site -- Facebook's popularity took a slight hit in the U.S. in January, dropping 800,000 visitors compared to the month before. The numbers, provided by online statistics aggregator comScore, show not only that the number of visitors to the site declined, but also that this latest result follows a gradual flattening of growth for the site that began last summer.

Looking back over the site's stats for the past two years, there have been a number of dips and drops, many more serious than this latest one. However, each was preceded by sharp increases in popularity. With its nearly flat growth coming before this most recent decline, is Facebook on its way out? Did Microsoft's half-billion dollar investment buy the social-networking site a tiny chunk of a declining enterprise? Or, are folks jumping the gun here and is the decrease in visitors simply due to everyone being exhausted from going back to work after the holidays?

If the worldwide Facebook numbers -- which still show a 3-percent growth in the same period -- are taken into account, it looks more like people may be jumping the gun (though even those global numbers are starting to flatten out from their once meteoric rises).

It remains to be seen....

From TechCrunch

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Tags: breaking+news, Facebook, top

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