There’s a website working to organize a coordinated dumping of Facebook and there’s a search suggestion on Google prompting users to find out how to delete their Facebook account. There are even droves of the technorati leaving the social network. But what does all of this hubbub over Facebook and privacy really add up to?
According to Hitwise, it’s all added up to a 3% increase in visits last week accounting for nearly 9% of all U.S. visits.
The tweet from Hitwise reads “Amid hub-bub, @Facebook.com visits up 3% last week vs. prev week & receiving 8.59% of all US visits. Up 8% for May-to-date vs. April.”
When we first wrote about Quit Facebook Day last Friday, there were nine people signed up. Jay Yarrow with the Silicon Valley Insider quickly put this into perspective, noting that 0.00000068% of Facebook users were promising to quit Facebook on May 31.
Since then, the number has grown to just under 5,000 users who vow to ditch the social networking giant, bringing that percentage to 0.00001% of an expected 500 million strong userbase.
Eric Eldon of Inside Facebook says he looks at Facebook’s traffic and user numbers each month and they’re still inconclusive according to his calculations.
“Facebook may have seen a slight slowdown after f8, but it has seen dips before, and we do not have enough information yet to determine if there is a meaningful relationship between traffic and the privacy changes… or if there is even a slowdown,” writes Eldon in a response to the Hitwise tweet this morning.
Of course, only time will tell in a situation like this, but we’ve seen little if any response from Facebook to indicate that it sees these 5,000 users, or the silent others, as little more than casualties of war in its bid to reorganize the Web.
