Ok, Let's first get the most important thing out of the way, no, Facebook is not going away, at least not anytime soon. But with over
600 million users, the social networking site has started showing the signs that it is a mature firm now. The latest figures show the site losing its subscribers and again such decline is happening in the more mature markets such as the US and the UK.
The month of May saw the number of US subscribers plummeting from 155.2 million to 149.4 million, net loss of 6 million users. Canada took the second spot by shedding 1.52 million users, but it still has 16.6 million Facebookers. The UK, Russia and Norway lost about 100,000 users each. But do not start writing the eulogies just yet, globally, the site added 11.8 million new users in the month of May, albeit the numbers were again lower than April, when the site added 13.9 million new users. During its growth phase, Facebook saw net addition of 20 million users every month, so now it is safe to assume that Facebook has reached its peak.
But the story is not over yet, as the stagnation is apparent only in the older and mature markets. The company and the site is still in the nascent stage in Asia and the other parts of world including densely populated countries such as India and China. Facebook is taking China very seriously, which is very apparent from the fact that the company CEO Zuckerberg visited the country to explore the opportunities there.
Currently, Facebook is enjoying riding the trough in countries like Brazil and Russia. Both the countries increased their subscriber base almost four times. Brazil currently has 17.1 million users whereas Russia has 4.6 million Facebook addicts. India also more than doubled the number of users to 24.9 million.