Facebook’s
user numbers remained flat in North America and fell in Europe on a
quarter-over-quarter basis, Twitter reported a slight downturn in monthly users,
and Snap posted a decline in daily active users for the second quarter.
CNBC floated the possibility that social-media growth has peaked, with no room to
add significant numbers of new users—at least in the West. Facebook still hopes
to use “lite” versions of its apps to secure gains in huge, virtually untapped markets
such as India and Indonesia. And, of course, China, with its billions of
potential users, remains closed for now to Facebook and other popular
platforms.
Facebook
and Twitter both blamed the European Union’s new data privacy law, the General
Data Protection Regulation, as a factor in their declines. However, Facebook’s
monthly page visits have been falling sharply for some time, according to a study by market research company SimilarWeb, from 8.5 billion to 4.7 billion over
the past two years.
Thanks
to that drop, YouTube, experiencing increased traffic and viewership, is poised
to potentially pass Facebook within the next few months to become the second-biggest
website in the U.S.