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Facebook is losing millions of users: study

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CIOL Bureau
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BANGALORE, INDIA: Social networking major Facebook, which is expected to to cross the one billion by 2012, has lost many users the United States, UK and Canada, says an analysis by the website called http://www.insidefacebook.com/.

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However, Facebook denied the findings and questioned the site as to how it arrived at this figure.

The startling report comes at a time when Facebook, valued at $50 billion, is planning for IPO, a movement that can further increase the value of the company to $100 billion.

The website, which tracks the developments happening at the social network platform, said more and more people are now quitting Facebook and logging on to other social networking sites.

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“Our data source was Inside Facebook Gold, our tracking service that shows country-by-country monthly active user counts, based exactly on the data that Facebook provides in its advertising tool. It showed Facebook falling from 155.2 million at the beginning of May to 149.4 million at the beginning of June, but growing by 11.8 million monthly actives around the world to reach 687.1 million over the same period,” the website said.

The maximum number of 'quitters' are from Britain and the US. In May, around 100,000 Britons deactivated their Facebook accounts, The Sun reported. But the site still has over 600 million users across the world.

Facebook gained 11.8 million members in May and 13.9 million in April - down from the usual 20 million new users a month seen in previous months, the report said.

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Twitter and Myspace are losing users in April: survey

The survey also shows Facebook’s most direct social product rivals, Twitter and MySpace, also losing users in April. However, different tracking sites have different statistics and this amount could not be specific. And Facebook is questioning these figures because of that only.

“From time to time, we see stories about Facebook losing users in some regions. Some of these reports use data extracted from our advertising tool, which provides broad estimates on the reach of Facebook ads and isn't designed to be a source for tracking the overall growth of Facebook,” the social networking major said in a statement.

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“We are very pleased with our growth and with the way people are engaged with Facebook. More than 50 per cent of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day,” the statement added.

Also, the site said, Brazil made a growth of 10 per cent in the number of users with 19 million people, while Mexico, with 23.7 million, grew 7.6 per cent. India marked a growth of 6.7 per cent with 24.9 million users.

While the United States lost nearly six million users in May, Canadian users fell 1.52 million to 16.6 million during the month. According to insidefacebook.com, Britain, Norway and Russia all posted losses of more than 100,000, said the website.

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Figures from Facebook monitoring site Inside Facebook suggested that during May, Facebook lost six million users in the US and 100,000 in the UK.

Anyhow, the survey once again leads us to the old question — is social networking losing its charm?

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