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Facebook in Decline?

After years of popularity, privacy scandals and even an Oscar-nominated movie—“The Social Network”—Facebook’s popularity may be in decline, according to Inside Facebook.

Facebook, which was about to hit 700 million users this month, hit a spike in people in Northern American abstaining from the using their social networking accounts since April according to the original report from the website, Inside Facebook.

The website, which tracks the Facebook’s statistics for developers and marketers, said that accounts from users located in the United States decreased to almost 6 million out of the 155.2 million users the site had in the country since May, and Canada’s users dropped by 1.5 million.

The site, which got their statistics from Google’s Double Click ad planner tool that tracks the number of unique visitors on the site, showed that usage has slowly declined since April.

Facebook countered the reports in an interview with VentureBeat saying, “From time to time, we see stories about Facebook losing users in some regions. Some of these reports use data extracted from our advertising tool, which provides broad estimates on the reach of Facebook ads and isn’t designed to be a source for tracking the overall growth of Facebook.”

Inside Facebook defended Facebook stating that despite their reports that seasonal changes such as graduations and other factors could influence the sites advertising tool.

Facebook went on to tell Venture Beat that they have been “pleased” with the growth of their site and that “50 percent of active users log on to Facebook on any given day.”

Internationally, Facebook has been growing with an estimated 2 million new users who have joined the site in the past two months in Mexico, Brazil and India according to the Huffington Post.