There’s More To The FaceBook Traffic Story

Om Malik says Facebook traffic is tanking, based on the September Comscore data which shows a 9.3% decline in uniques v. steady uniques at MySpace.

There’s a problem though - he’s showing unique visitor data but talking about traffic. The Comscore data for U.S. traffic shows only a 4% decline, from 15.2 billion to 14.7 billion page views. MySpace declined 2% in that same period.

And the data is also only taking U.S. traffic into account. Over the last year, non U.S. users have grown to become more than half of Facebook’s total audience. Comscore worldwide data runs a month behind U.S. data, so that information is not yet available for September.

But the bottom line is, there isn’t enough information yet to make any kind of definitive statement about Facebook traffic. It’s also worth noting that something very similar may have happened last year (a September dip in traffic) At the very least we need to wait for the international data.

Data is below - unique visitors is top, below is page views.

Wikipedia Hits Mid Life Slow Down

We posted yesterday on the move by the Wikimedia Foundation to relocate from Florida to San Francisco, but aside from the obvious conclusions that the move would allow Wikimedia to tap into the superior developer community out West, there may be another reason as well: a mid life slow down.

It’s tempting to call it a mid-life crisis, but it’s far too bland for that label. Robert Rohde has put together a statistical analysis on Wikipedia activity and has discovered that things are rapidly slowing down on Wikipedia after years of astronomical growth.

According to Rohde, since the beginning of the year the rate of editing articles has declined 17%, new account registrations are down 25%, user blocks are down 30%, article protection is down 30%, uploads are down 10% and article deletions are down 25%.

Rohde also has also put together some graphs here that show that an increasing number of edits are reverts (now at 20%) as opposed to the addition of new material, which he aptly calls “Unproductive Article Edits.”