Facebook Loses Active Users

It's been evident that the number of unique visitors on Facebook was leveling off in recent months, but now comes evidence of a significant decline. Via an article on Hypebot, the site analyst company ComScore has determined that the number of unique visitors to Facebook have declined by 4.8% in the last six months!

This is pretty substantial in that Facebook was counting on its subscribers to rise a bit in the US rather than dropping, in order to support its recent IPO and subsequent investors. It's true that its more likely that the company will gain users in other parts of the world (in Asia in particular) as the US market seems somewhat saturated, but a decline of almost 5% is really unexpected.

So what's the reason for the decline? Are the users tiring of the Facebook experience? Do they hate the redesign (especially Timeline)? Are they using another social network instead? Are they still using the network but not loggin in? What do you think?

For the record, Facebook claimed that it has over 900 million "active" users in their last quarterly report. It'll be interesting to see what the next quarter report looks like.

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