游戏邦注：本文作者为Eric Eldon，文章通过研究几大最早采用Facebook国家用户发展情况，总结网站用户增长趋势。

过去几个月最早采用Facebook的大国其网站流量纷纷出现奇怪波动现象。例如，加拿大至去年年中以来，Facebook用户成千上万，而今年4月份，其Facebook用户减少近50万。

但各国Facebook用户的发展总趋势是什么呢？下面就让我们参考以往数据，看看是否能够从中发现更主要趋势。我们绘制了五大最早广泛采用Facebook国家2008年以来每月用户增长情况图（游戏邦注：还其中包括美国、英国、土耳其和澳大利亚）。

facebook early adopters

结论：从中我们可以发现各国用户出现明显削减趋势，而增长曲线的下滑程度几乎接近0%。显然，其中增幅存在欺骗性，因为最初各国的增长都是相当显著的，但随着时间推移，该数据不断减少。所以结果也就显而易见。当中多个国家去年年中的增长率依旧维持5%甚至以上。

但即便几大最早采用Facebook国家的用户开始减少，其下滑程度也不会降到0%以下，因为毕竟Facebook覆盖了各个年龄层、各大地区的男女用户。增幅也许会降至0%以下。但如果就如Facebook所言，网站每天都有一半用户回访，为何其用户增幅还会降至零下呢？

除了土耳其（游戏邦注：只有1/3的土耳其人使用Facebook）外，其他四个国家使用Facebook的人口比例均超过一半。我们发现任何Facebook用户超过人口一半的国家其用户增长趋势都会呈现停滞不前的状态。这个图表进一步证明这个观察结论。

在这些国家中，近来的用户回访率会比过去几个月明显减少，并且没有新用户填充其中空缺。用户减少程度和频率从去年7月份开始日益加剧，而自从出现下滑趋势后，网站用户的增长势头显然大大不如过去几年。

而且过去几个月甚，网站用户至还出现了负增长。这也许还同其他因素有关，例如，我们获取数据的Facebook广告工具还存在漏洞。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，转载请注明来源：游戏邦）

Countries That Adopted Facebook Early See Lower Traffic Growth Rates, Occasionally NegativeMay

By Eric Eldon

Many of the largest, earliest-established countries on Facebook have seen odd traffic fluctuations in the last months, according to our Inside Facebook Gold data. Canada, for example, has gained or lost tens of thousands of users since the middle of last year, and in April lost near half a million users.

But what’s the overall trend? We took a closer look at our historical data to see if larger trends emerge. We graphed the growth rate each month going back to the start of 2008 for five of the first countries to see very broad adoption of Facebook, also including the United States, the United Kingdom, Turkey and Australia.

The results: You can clearly see the overall decline over time, with each of the five falling towards zero. Obviously, percentage gain here can be deceiving because any growth is a lot, proportionally, at the start, but less so as a given country gains. So you’d expect what you see here — sort of. It’s actually surprising to see how many countries maintained growth rates of 5% or more through the middle of last year.

But even if early-adopting countries started losing users, you’d still expect it to not fall below zero given how sticky the site has been with users of varying age, gender, and regional groups. Growth might fall to zero, but why would it go below if half of Facebook users come back every day, as Facebook says?

Except for Turkey, which only has around a third of the country on Facebook, the rest of the countries have roughly half of their populations on Facebook. We’ve previously observed that this is around where a country of any size will stall. The graph here provides further support to that observation.

In these countries, it does appear that recently fewer people come back than had in previous months, without new users making up for the losses. The severity and frequency of the drops appears to have increased starting last July, and the recovery gains have been weaker than in past years had been after drops.

The average decline over months has yet to become negative, though. There are other possible factors at work, too, such as bugs in the Facebook ad tool that we get this data from.

We’ll continue tracking the trends here. For anyone interested in Facebook’s future, whether users, developers, marketers, investors or others, identifying the long-term directions here is crucial for planning how to capitalize on Facebook’s success, or lack thereof.（Source：insidefacebook）