Facebook Losing Favour In Britain

The Age

Saturday February 23, 2008

Nick Miller

IT SEEMS some Brits are getting sick of updating and sharing their online profiles - and Australians might soon follow.

The darling of the Web 2.0 world, social networking site Facebook, has for the first time lost users in the latest Neilsen Online UK poll, falling from 8.9 million users in December to 8.5 million in January.

Some analysts have been quick to write off the trendy site, saying as soon as Tory MPs and major corporations got on the bandwagon it was only a matter of time before the cool kids left.

Alex Burmaster, European internet analyst at Nielsen Online, preferred to read it as an inevitable plateau, pointing out that there are 712% more Facebook users than a year ago. He admitted that there could be an element of "Facebook fatigue" as users tired of the work needed to keep up with the demands of virtual society.

Competitors MySpace and Bebo also lost users.

There are signs Australia is following a similar path. Figures from Hitwise show that in November the site had a 19% share of the Australian social networking market, but since then it has dropped to just under 18%.

In September, the average Australian user spent 23 minutes and 30 seconds a month on the site - this dropped to 21 minutes and 15 seconds in January.

Hitwise marketing director Rheika Tompkins said all social networking sites had seen a drop in popularity in January.

"I think it's too early to say that Facebook is declining," she said. "If you look at the weekly February data it seems to be picking up again."

Facebook is the UK's most popular social networking platform, while in Australia MySpace is the leader with 3 million users.

Australia is the fifth biggest Facebook population by nationality.

© 2008 The Age

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