Is Facebook on the decline in the UK?

Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK

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March 20, 2008

Is Facebook on the decline in the UK?

During the last month there have been a number of ‘Facebook is over’ type stories in the press and across the blogosphere. The main reason for this was the very real decline in the social network’s UK market share during January. This had followed a peak in December, particularly during the Christmas period. However, as the chart below illustrates, the site’s market share has been increasing again since the start of February and is now at its highest level since the middle of December.

Bill has written before about confusing downturns with seasonality. Looking at Facebook’s traffic data from the same period last year in the chart below, a similar pattern emerges. However, despite the similarity it is clear that the rate of growth has declined. This time last year the traffic was almost back to Christmas levels, but it still has a way to go this year.

Of course, Facebook’s market share in the UK is going to have to decline at some point, but when is this likely to happen? One clue might be found by looking at average session times, as Heather Dougherty has done in the US. As social networks increase their market share, their average visit time also increases. The network effect means that the more people that are using a site, the more friends they have and the longer they spend there.

Bebo and MySpace are still both amongst the top 10 most visited website sites in the UK, but their overall market share of UK Internet visits started to gradually decline in June, partly due to the growth of Facebook and other competing social networks. As you can see from the chart below, this decline coincided with the flattening off of their average session times. Facebook’s average session time is also starting to level off, so that may point towards the site reaching its peak. On the other hand, Facebook may well buck this trend, so it’ll be interesting to see how it fares over the next couple on months.

Now, although Facebook, Myspace and Bebo are the three largest and most visible social networks in the UK, they are not the only ones. The success or failure of particular sites is less important than the performance of the industry as a whole. As the chart below illustrates, the market share of our Social Networking and Forums category has continued to grow over the last 12 months, although the rate of growth has begun to flatten out. As with Facebook, the industry as a whole experiences notable seasonal peaks over Christmas and during September as the new school / university term begins.

Perhaps more significantly for the rest of the Internet, the amount of upstream traffic that other websites receive from social networks has also increased over the last year. Last week our Social Networking and Forums category accounted for 7.98% of all UK Internet visits and 9.13% of all upstream traffic to All Categories. During the seasonal Christmas peak, one in every 10 UK Internet visits came from the category.