Facebook’s growth, both in terms of the number of users, as well as visitors, has to slow down one day. Well, it is slowing down now, but it’s still huge given how big Facebook already is. Compete’s numbers for April show that Facebook
(
) has grown from 91,000,000 to 104,000,000 unique visitors, a healthy 14.35% increase from March.
What’s the secret, you ask? Facebook Connect. Facebook tracking blog Inside Facebook has noticed that unique visits to the actual Facebook site have grown by mere 4.6% - a respectable number, but nowhere near last month’s 11% growth rate. Facebook Connect, on the other hand, has grown a staggering 40.9% to 60 million unique visitors. As it gets implemented on more and more sites, it’ll likely sustain Facebook’s overall growth even as the main site’s growth inevitably slows down.
Where is MySpace (
) in all this? Stagnating. As you can see in the graph above, the number of unique visitors are slowly dwindling, having fallen a 0.06% in March and 8.61% in a year. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what MySpace has been doing wrong; I’d say that users have simply outgrown it, and switched to other more innovative social networks like Facebook and Twitter, while they were unable - or unwilling - to change enough to keep up. It’s still a huge social network, but unless they do something radical, I don’t see their numbers going anywhere but down in the following months.
Twitter (
), on the other hand, has looked tiny compared to these services mere months ago. Now it can definitely be put on the same graph, but to show its stellar growth I’ve given it a graph of its own. The growth has slowed down somewhat; the number of unique visitors has grown from 14,000,000 to 19,000,000, which is 38,56% growth. It looks bad compared to last month’s 76.8% increase, but at this level it’s probably impossible to keep growing at such a rate. On an annual basis, it’s still an unbelievable 1,192.13 percent. It’s worth noting that the service has been very stable lately, despite this enormous influx of new users; hopefully the frequent visits from the old fail whale are now a thing of the past.
