Only 320,800 new month active users were registered in June, compared to the whopping 7.8 million Facebook gathered in May, according to statistics published by website Inside Facebook.
This means that in June, Facebook’s growth in the US was a mere 0.3%, a figure far short of its 3-4% average monthly growth.
Inside Facebook’s Chris Morrison wrote on 6 July that this dip was, possibly, “the backlash from heavy media attention to Facebook privacy issues”.
Morrison explained that while the negative growth could be “a blip”, Inside Facebook has “rarely seen a dip like this, so we would tend to favour the idea of a root cause”.
However, 70% of Facebook users are now outside of the US. According to comScore, Mexico had 11 million active users in the past year, tripling previous counts. Germany showed extremely strong performance as well, more than quadrupling its number of active users to 19 million.
Elsewhere, the social networking giant is expanding its user base in Italy, Brazil and India, reports The New York Times. In the latter country, Facebook is going head to head with its dominant social network, Google’s Orkut.
The main reason behind this expansion is the company’s translation efforts, which Facebook managed to crowdsource.
It was a resounding success: in just two years, Facebook went from being solely in English to now being available in more than 80 languages.
“They have been more innovative than any other social network, and they are going to continue to grow,” Altimeter Group analyst Jeremiah Owyang told The New York Times.
He continued, “Facebook wants to be ubiquitous, and they are being successful for now.”
With the US figures floundering, it remains to be seen if the company can make up for this loss by garnering more users from other parts around the globe.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has predicted that the number of users in its site will hit the one billion mark, but did not give a target date. It currently has 500 million users.
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