Inside Facebook

Facebook released an update to the application directory today, changing the published engagement metric for applications from daily active users to monthly active users. The change marks Facebook’s third iteration on published application metrics, reflecting Facebook’s increasing desire for developers to adopt a more long-term view of application engagement.

To recap briefly:

1. In the beginning, Facebook published the number of total application installs, ranking applications by those which the most users had engaged with at least once.
2. Then, Facebook switched the primary published metric to daily active users, ranking apps by those which users visited most on any given day. (Facebook continued to publish the daily active %, allowing third parties to extrapolate total installs.)
3. Starting today, Facebook is now publishing monthly active users instead of daily active users, ranking apps by those which the most users have visited over the last 30 days, saying it wants to help developers “focus on building longer-term engagement.”

However, with the switch to monthly active users, Facebook is no longer publishing a monthly active % - removing the notion of an “install” from published stats. Going forward, developers and observers will only have access to “monthly active” numbers - “percent active” will no longer be available.