A few weeks ago I said the recent drop in UK traffic to Facebook was not significant as it had happened over the Christmas break. According to 95% of the British media this view was wrong and the fall heralded the end of the social networking roller-coaster as we know it.
Today Hitwise reports that Facebook’s market share of UK Internet visits last week (w/e 22 March 2008) was equal to its previous record high of 2.16% during the Christmas week (w/e 29 December 2007).
I hate to say I told you so…
Yeah, agreed at the time – far too early to cry Wolf.
http://broadstuff.com/archives/704-The-Decline-and-Fall-of-Social-Media-a-bit-early-to-cry-wolf.html
Nice one Mike!
Those who chanted the defeat of Facebook a few months ago tend to fall in 2 categories:
- Those that can only envy the traffic that Facebook generates
- Those who think that social networks are only a fad. Those are generally in their 30s, they think they’re still “cool” and that they understand the latest consumer trends, but they completely mis-judged the fundamental change that social networks represent.
It’s against Hitwise’s T&Cs to publish screenshots.
Hi Mike
Love the article. We also picked up on that conversation too – actually I think we were first (gentle teasing).
@Anon, I hear what you are saying (as does Mike I assume) but in reality I have never heard of HitWise forcing someone to take them down because at the end of the day this is great distribution for their services. It has been my belief that the T&C is more of a ‘If you do something that actually upsets us we will have the right to kick your a$$’.
Cheers
Roger
http://www.techwinter.com
Thanks picking up on this data – good to see that this topic is generating debate on this and other blogs.
Just to clarify on the T+Cs issue – we’re happy for people to use any charts and data that we have put into the public domain via the blog or other PR / marketing activites – as long as everything is sourced correctly (as it is here!).
Robin Goad
Research Director, Hitwise
Thanks Robin, I figured as much.
When Facebook in UK starts? I saw http://www.facebook.co.uk/ butnothing in it
Please compare apples and apples Mike. Those reports were based on a drop in Facebook’s monthly visitors, not its share of UK internet visits.
Pah, that’s pretty typical of the UK, we’re *desperate* to knock anything successful – to my mind explaining most of the entrepreneurial gulf between here and the states…
CarlosF has a very good point – the market share is affected by every single other website in the UK so is not a reliable measure of traffic & usage at all e.g. in Jan & Feb travel sites go crazy for people planning holidays which skews the market (maybe thats what we see here?)… but really we need to see the visits stats to understand whats going on.
I don’t think facebook is dead or dying, but didn’t i read somewhere that engagement is dropping (i.e. time spent on site?)
Huzzah. Does that mean the same for my blog stats too then? Yes, let’s just pretend it’s that.