The world’s famous social network Facebook witnessed a sharp decrease of 70 percent of page views and one million users in January 2011, according to a newly released report by DoubleClick Ad Planner. It seems that the social network has become less favorited by Vietnamese users.

The report also showed that in January 2011, there were 21 million Internet users in Vietnam and there were 17 billion page views, a decrease of two billion in comparison with December 2010. Most websites witnessed a sharp decrease in the numbers of users and page views during the month. The websites which saw the sharpest decreases in numbers of users and page views included microsoft.com; xalo.vn and tin247.com.

Each of the websites saw the number of users and page views decrease by 400,000-1 million. Six out of 10 websites were news and information portals. These also included two music websites, while the others were social network and e-commerce. Zing.vn was reportedly the website which had the highest number of page views in January. However, the number of page views of Zing.vn was lower by 200 million in comparison with the previous months. Meanwhile, the number of page views of Yahoo dropped by 180 million.

Since the total number of page views decreased, the duration of website access also decreased. Facebook once witnessed splendid growth rates in previous months, but suddenly saw sharp reductions in both the number of users and page views in January 2011. Facebook had 340 million page views in the first month of 2011, down by 70 percent from the previous month. By the end of January, the social network had had 2.6 million users, a decrease of 0.9 million.

Meanwhile, also according to Google Ad planner, in 2010, Zing Me led social networks in Vietnam  with 4.6 million users, followed by Facebook, while Yahoo and Yume ranked third and fourth. By December 2010, Facebook reached 1.1 billion page views in Vietnam alone.

The sharp reduction of the number of users of Facebook turns out to be good news for many Vietnamese entrepreneurs. Will this be a golden opportunity for Vietnamese social networks to attract Vietnamese users? Vietnamese social networks have advantages to foreign ones, especially because they are developed by Vietnamese for Vietnamese.

The social network Go.vn has announced that it is preparing to welcome the 3 millionth member and it is going to use two-character domain name (the currently used domain name is goonline.vn), nine months after the first trial version was released. With the current high growth rate, the managers of Go.vn believe that they will welcome the 3 millionth member soon.

According to VTC, the owner of Vietnam Network, by the end of February 2011, the network had had 2.9 million accounts. myGo, the social network belonging to Vietnam Network has every reason to become one of the two social networks that can attract a high membership.

In 2009, Vietnam’s social network users suffered a blow when their favorite site Yahoo! 360  officially closed on July 13. After that, the social network market divided.

Those who like local social networks became members of Yume, Zingme, Tamtay, i-pro, Henantrua, Vietspace, etc., while others who like foreign networks joined Multiply, Wordpress, Yahoo Plus, Twitter, etc. However, none of the social networks could dominate the market.

After that, Facebook became a phenomenon in Vietnam in late 2009 and it has become a favorite social network for Vietnamese people since then.

Tuyet Ngan