Source: Shawn Campbell

Twitter continues to grow and draw in new users, but a new report from eMarketer suggests the boom may be coming to an end. Year after year Twitter’s growth is slowing down, and it looks like the trend will continue for the foreseeable future.

As eMarketer reports in their first-ever forecast of global Twitter users, Twitter’s user base will increase by 24.4% in 2014. If this is proven true at the end of the year, it will continue the pattern that has already been taking place for the past few years. In 2015, it is predicted Twitter’s growth rate could drop to just 9%.

In 2013, Twitter grew by 30%, and 2012 saw a 50% rate of growth. The majority of recent growth has come from overseas.

If eMarketer’s estimates are correct, it would put Twitter at a total of 227.5 million users this year, and 269.9 million in 2015.

Several people have noted that these numbers are quite different from Twitter’s own reported 225 million monthly active users, which the service said it reachedlast month. The difference in the figures can be explained however by eMarketer’s decision notto include business accounts and instances of multiple accounts. As they explained:

Our figures differ from Twitter’s reported figure of 255 million monthly active users in 2013 because we rely heavily on consumer data to weed out business accounts, multiple accounts for individual users, and other sources of potential double-counting.

These numbers paint a grim picture for Twitter, who has already admitted its trouble with retaining users, especially as Wall Street becomes increasingly disappointed in Twitter’s slow user growth.