Couple of weeks back there was big hue and cry over report (pdf)
from researchers at Princeton University that came up to a conclusion
that Facebook would lose 80% of their users by 2017. The report
essentially said that they will get into similar situation like MySpace
and majority of users will desert them in next 3 years.
Leaving aside these theoretical and hypothetical research outcomes, we
decided to look at some hard numbers to understand how Facebook has been
doing in terms of growth. To compare, we looked at some of the stats we
had come up with in August last year
based on the numbers that Facebook gives out on their ad platform.
Currently, if you choose “All users in India”, Facebook shows
96 million users.
This number in August last year stood at 95 million users. What this
essentially means is that Facebook user base in India has remained
constant over last 6 months. One can safely say that their user base in
India has stagnated. This is on the back of the fact that India is
adding new Internet users at a healthy rate.
Conclusion
One has to bear in mind that 2 months is a very short period to draw any
conclusions in terms of traffic. What should be more worrying factor
for Facebook is that they are not seeing user numbers growing in India.
In our view, Whatsapp and other mobile messaging platforms also have a
major part to play. These IMs provide needed privacy and users do not
have to worry about anything else, unlike on Facebook where they need
understand the platform well to use it properly.
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