CNet is running a story on how traffic to Facebook, Bebo and MySpace dropped between 2 and 5 percent between December and January:
If anything, this could mean that after rapid expansion, social networks have reached a saturation point. “It was inevitable that early growth rates couldn’t be sustained, and the larger networks have been plateauing over the last few months,” Nielsen analyst Alex Burmaster told the Guardian.
I don’t know who these analysts are, but maybe they should have a look at who the users of these sites are and what they tend to be doing in December. Every single social networking site sees a drop during December because college students are on vacation. Simple as that. What these numbers really mean is that the market never grew much beyond college students - that should be the real concern here.
I wish people would get tired of social networks and stop using the Internet with training wheels and get themselves a real web presence, but until then, many an analyst will make money predicting this kind of stuff.
Update: TechCrunch today reported on the stagnation of Facebook traffic over the last few months. This, I think, is different from the situation in the UK where there is no evidence for a stagnation, just a seasonal dip. In the US, the market may indeed be saturated.
As anyone who has run anything from web forums to email list will tell you there are specific times of the year when any service will see a drop in users. The next drop will most likely happen near the end of June .. I wonder what these pundits will write about then.
I got use to this cycle back when I had the WinExtra NNTP newsgroups and it has continued with the web forum version.
It just seems so obvious, doesn’t it? I always like to point out reckless punditry