Huwebes, Mayo 2, 2013

Are Facebook Users Peaking? Beware of the Missing Mobiles


By Tom Gara


That was a pretty serious sounding headline over at the Guardian yesterday, which led into a story with some big numbers:
“Facebook has lost 10 million users in the US and seen no growth in monthly visitors in the UK over the past year, according to data from market research firm Nielsen.
Research shows that the number of unique visitors to the Facebook website from computers, smartphones and tablets has fallen from 153 million in March 2012 to 142 million in March this year, having peaked at 158 million last August.”
Those numbers are hinted at in other recent stories suggesting Facebook’s user base might be peaking, but as the Guardian points out, Facebook has said “the number of users accessing from personal computers is falling, while traffic from mobile devices is surging.”
It might be tempting to read declining logins to Facebook.com as declining Facebook usage — and we all love a good how-the-mighty-are-falling story — but in this case, beware of misreading the numbers. Website use might be heading down, but that’s because of the huge shift to mobile currently taking place.
And as Nielsen itself says, the numbers quoted in this Guardian story actually refer to traffic to Facebook.com from PCs, not phones. While some mobile users still log in through the browser on their phone, Nielsen measures that traffic separately, and says those users are well outnumbered by the 99 million people who checked in through Facebook’s smartphone apps in the U.S. in March 2013. That is up from 62 million a year ago, and those extra 37 million well outnumber the 11 million fewer logins to the website.
So while some web traffic numbers might be down, it’s a mistake to read this as a peak in usage. The company is undergoing an amazing boom in mobile usage, highlighted by its quarterly results released today. From the WSJ’s Evelyn Rusli:
Twelve months ago, the social network barely had a mobile business. On Wednesday, Facebook disclosed how that has changed: Nearly one out of every three dollars it produces now comes from advertising on smartphones and tablets.
The shift came as the Menlo Park, Calif., company posted a 38% revenue rise to $1.46 billion in the first quarter from a year earlier, as net income rose 6.8% to $219 million.
In particular, Facebook’s mobile-ad sales jumped 22% to $374 million from the prior quarter. The company said mobile-ad sales now form 30% of advertising revenue, up from 23% in the fourth quarter and 14% in the third quarter. Results were also buoyed by new targeting tools for advertisers and other new ad products.
Here’s a graph of the mobile-only usage over time, via Matt Lynley’s liveblog of the Facebook earnings call over at Digits.

And even daily active users, the most engaged of Facebook users, are still growing everywhere, in both developed and emerging markets:



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