Facebook Subscriptions Declining, Cancellations Growing

For months and months, there has been talk of Facebook as a constantly growing reality: the impressive numbers and the pace of new registrations have provided daily food for thought for this great “parallel universe” of sociality.
For a few weeks, however, there seems to have been a change of direction or – to minimize it – at least a slowdown in the constantly positive trend.
Just a few days ago here on FullPress, we talked about the “Facebook slump“: Italians have shown less interest in the social network or rather, they have spent less time on the 2.0 platform.
The trend, according to very fresh data arriving in these hours from Inside Facebook Gold, is not just Italian but can be extended globally: in the last two months, Facebook has reportedly seen a significant decrease.
While up until last March the blue portal could count on about 20 million new profiles created per month, in April something started to crack: compared to the trend, there was a ‘shortage’ of 7 million potential new members. It did not go any better in May, when new joiners were 11,800,000.
We are still talking about huge numbers, no doubt about it.
To support this data, we could cross-reference others, this time not on potential registrants but on actual users already on Facebook who, however, have decided to request the deletion of their profile: in Canada alone, along with the United States, there are about 7.5 million unsubscribes.
A very important figure when contextualized in these two regions, where Facebook is a well-established social network: this should sound as a small alarm bell.
It is obvious that just two months of decline cannot be interpreted as the end of Facebook or as the tolling of the funeral bells; however, we must reflect on how much the issues related to privacy on Facebook (constantly at risk on the social network) have led to deletions.

UPDATE of June 14, 2011: following the publication of the article, the editorial staff was contacted by the Facebook press office in Italy for some clarifications. We gladly publish an official statement released to FullPress: “From time to time articles appear claiming that Facebook is losing users in some countries or is experiencing a slowdown in overall growth. Some of this news uses data extrapolated using our advertising tool, which only provides an approximate estimate of ad reach and was not designed to track Facebook’s overall growth. We consider our growth trend very satisfactory, as are the ways in which people interact with Facebook. More than 50% of our active users connect to Facebook every day“.