Has Facebook reached its peak?

According to Statista, Facebook has over 2.89 billion (yes, billion) active monthly users, which makes it the biggest social media platform in the world. The number of active Facebook users has been growing relentlessly year over year. But since the third quarter of 2021, the growth has been wavering. Since the fourth quarter of 2021, the number of active users has started to decline for the first time since Facebook was founded in 2004.  

At Dataprovider.com we index the web, so we can see the digital footprint of Facebook. How? We track all Facebook widgets, buttons and URLs that website owners use to refer to their company Facebook page. These widgets, buttons and URLs are part of a networking strategy that social media platforms use to leverage the traffic of other domains. Driving more traffic to their platforms results in more active users. So the change in the number of widgets, buttons or URLs can be an important indicator for growth or decline in the number of active users on a particular platform. 

Has Facebook reached its peak? Our data shows that the number of widgets, buttons or URLs has hardly changed in the past two years. In other words, the number of website owners that refer to their Facebook page hasn’t been growing. This isn’t a good signal for Facebook.