Facebook: users say they'll leave, but will they follow through?

Facebook users in the UK and America are saying that they will quit Facebook if they are subjected to “too much advertising”.

The news comes ahead of an expected announcement by Facebook of a mobile advertising platform this week.

With 420 million people accessing Facebook regularly via their mobiles, a piece of research by Upstream claims that 27% of British Facebook users and 20% of American users would stop using the site if they get too much advertising (the research doesn’t establish how much is too much).

Should Facebook be worried? The addition of mobile advertising will most likely privacy experts another area to criticise the way Facebook uses the data of members. But users who are seriously worried about privacy and Facebook have probably already deleted their profiles.

Anecdotal evidence moment: every time Facebook changes its layout or introduces some new feature, I notice a number of complaints appearing from friends in my timeline and threats to leave, which seem rarely to have been followed. So are threats by users to quit Facebook in the advent of more advertising likely to be followed through? I doubt anyone’s going to cancel their subscription to the Facebook IPO worrying about it.

The findings are published in Upstream’s 2012 Digital Advertising Attitudes Report, based on a YouGov poll of 4,159 adults aged 18+ in the UK and the US on a range of digital advertising issues.