Rory Maher, senior internet analyst at Capstone Investments, has published the findings of some research his firm carried out independently over the last six months into Facebook’s user figures.
Using ‘proprietary software’ to track user numbers across 200 countries, Maher found that Facebook user numbers had declined by 1.1 per cent across both Europe and the US.
Of the 23 countries in which Facebook’s membership exceeds 50 per cent of the population, as it does in the UK – with more than 30 million users, 14 of those saw the number of people using the social network drop or stay the same. Only in nine of the countries in this block did Facebook’s member figures continue to rise.
Maher said: “Over the past six months we believe users in the US, UK, Denmark, and Turkey have decreased while users in Asian countries like Japan, South Korea, and India has increased significantly. For example, we estimate U.S. users decreased by 1.1 per cent over the past six months and 0.7 per cent the past three months - while UK users were essentially flat over the same periods. Japan and India have grown users 60.3 per cent and 20.3 per cent over the past six months.”
