Online's biggest guns including Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!7 have been hit with a dramatic drop-off in user numbers which is perplexing some of the best brains in the business.
According to Nielsen Online's new hybrid measurement system, Facebook lost 653,000 users between September and November last year. Google was off 443,000 users, another 584,000 users vanished from the Microsoft Network while Yahoo!7 took the single biggest hit among top-tier publishers with a decline of 868,000 users over the three months to November 2011.
"Everyone feels like it's a strange result," said Naked Melbourne managing director Matt Houltham. "It feels strange to me and not reflective of the things Facebook is doing, for example, to engage users. There has been a lot of shifting around as people try out new social platforms like Google+ but that doesn't explain the variations in the data."
Facebook and Google's figures are perplexing, although a Ninemsn spokesperson said the end of winter sporting competitions such as the AFL and Rugby League partly explained the declines. "We see this every year," she said. "It would be the same for Yahoo!7. In January and February it will jump back."
Despite this, Ninemsn acknowledged there had been an overall decline in the "online universe" - that is, the total number of Australian users - for September and October, down from 16.6 million to 16.3 million. Sporting seasonality did not explain the Google and Facebook declines, however.
This article first appeared in the 27 January 2012 edition of AdNews. Click here to subscribe for more news, features and opinion.
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