Facebook loses users in US and Canada amid slow growth

GlobalPost
The World

Facebook has reported considerably slower growth for the second month straight, and lost 6 million users in the United States and 1.5 million in Canada for the first time in a year.

According to Mashable, the slowdown of Facebook "might be a significant pointer for the company’s future."

The social networking site is still growing towards 700 million users, having reached 687 million monthly actives by the start of June, according to marketing experts Inside Facebook.

Most new users came from countries that were relatively late in adopting Facebook — developing countries like Mexico, Brazil and India, each of which picked up about 2 million users from May to June.

However, Facebook gained only 11.8 million new users in May, and 13.9 million in April — compared to a typical month in the last year when it grew by at least 20 million users.

According to Inside Facebook:

The United States lost nearly 6 million users, falling from 155.2 million at the start of May to 149.4 million at the end of it. This is the first time the country has lost users in the past year.

Canada also fell significantly, by 1.52 million down to 16.6 million, although it has been fluctuating around that number for the past year.

Meanwhile, the United Kingdom, Norway and Russia all posted losses of more than 100,000. If these countries — most of whom had adopted Facebook many years ago — had not lost users, and instead posted even small gains, Facebook would have had a much more typical month.

While there have been a few months that have registered lower growth numbers, the website reports, they have not been back to back.

However, it noted that once about 50 percent of a country's population was on Facebook, growth basically stopped.

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