Facebook sees 5% drop in UK during January

First ever UK drop, fell from 8.9m to 8.5m users

[gibbergibber]

The BBC is reporting that Facebook has seen a drop in UK users for the first time ever, between December 2007 and January 2008:

[news.bbc.co.uk...]

Personally I have a little bit of trouble believing those figures anyway. 8.9 million is approximately one sixth of the British population, are they really claiming one in six Britons use Facebook?

Perhaps a lot of UK users sign in with several different aliases, and these aliases are now consolidating into one account per real user?

[rogerd]

Interesting. One in six market penetration would be fairly amazing if true.

Sooner or later, any site has to hit the wall. The real question will be whether they can keep their existing users engaged and get them to do more via Facebook vs. other sites.

[inbound]

As there are around 30 Million Internet users in the UK I cannot believe that they have that many unique users. Many users of rival systems just don't fit the profile for using facebook so the figures they claim start to look even more unnatainable (or impressive if true).