The guys over at Mashable seem to have number to back up what I have suspected for a few weeks now.
The latest stats from Nielsen Online show a significant decline in month-over-month unique visitors to Facebook in the US. In April, traffic fell to 22.4M uniques, down from the 24.9M reported in March. Year-over-year traffic growth decelerated from 98% to a much more modest 56%. MySpace also saw a modest decline (from 60.3M to 58.7M), while LinkedIn continued its torrid growth from 7.8M uniques in March to 8.6M in April.
Check out their website for the full story but I really think this could be the beginning of the end where the whole 2.0 space starts to consolidate.
After all, there are only so many social web site profiles that a user can maintain and now we are even seeing social site aggregators from the likes of Google to try and help.
Of course the cynical amongst you will suggest that the whole Web 2.0 marketing machine is self fulfilling with no substance behind it. Certainly there is a lot of buzz about Web 2.0 and social networking.
So is this is a bad thing?
No and social networks will continue. They have introduced us to new ways of using the Internet and of communicating in general but the time has now arrived where this industry has to grow up in the same way as the Internet had to in the late 90s’. There will no doubt be some big casualties and heavy losses but with the US already heading towards a major depression, this will just help things down that downwards spiral.
