Facebook reached nearly 100 million European users in September, its strongest month yet in the region. And the company is looking to expand its operations accordingly, especially at its Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) headquarters in Dublin, Ireland. The focus appears to be on hiring people in a variety of sales and other business operation positions, presumably as a means to grow the company’s European advertising revenue.

Out of the 33 positions listed on the company’s Dublin job site, nearly half are directly related to sales and advertising. Most of the others are for back-end business operations, and for language-specific user services.

The company is also hiring 7 people — mostly ad jobs — in its London office, and one account executive position  in Italy. Meanwhile, it appears to have snagged former Google and Last.fm regional head Scott Woods to run its push into the German advertising market.

Europe has a well-developed advertising market, and as Facebook is making this revenue stream its priority for the time being, the expansion is hardly surprising. The company could make more than $550 million in revenue for 2009, mostly from advertising. We don’t know what portion of that is already coming in from Europe, although the Dublin regional headquarters was only announced a year ago, so the effort is likely still getting off the ground. Assuming Facebook continues growing its user base in the region, look for this expansion to start paying off next year.

For some more context, here’s data I just pulled from our Global Monitor report last month, showing the ten largest countries on Facebook, along with their annual growth rates and growth numbers. For more, see our articles last week on which 10 European countries grew the fastest last month, including notable surges in Germany and Austria.

[Image of Europe via thecontaminated]

The story of last week on Facebook’s platform was the growth of Zynga’s Café World social game, and it easily took the number on spot on our list of the top 20 fastest-growing apps. It launched on October 2nd and by today has reached more than 10 million monthly active users through a combination of cross-promotion, advertising, and, well, being a solid iteration on the virtual restaurant game concept. It grew by 8.60 million fans since Sunday, although Facebook does not appear to have updated the last few days’ worth of data so growth could be even higher now.

		Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %	Developer
1.		Café World	10,098,584	+8,598,277	+573.1	Zynga
2.		FarmVille	56,122,407	+2,422,800	+4.5	Zynga
3.		Quizzer	6,258,466	+1,018,944	+19.5	Quizzer
4.		Status Statistics	2,879,755	+823,974	+40.1	—
5.		Causes	31,408,033	+716,774	+2.3	Causes
6.		Horoscopes	5,083,013	+647,687	+14.6	RockYou!
7.		Pet Society	19,512,235	+623,927	+3.3	Playfish
8.		Birthday Cards	21,259,390	+463,453	+2.2	RockYou!
9.		What will happen tomorrow with you?	1,603,302	+461,302	+40.4	—
10.		(Lil) Farm Life	4,737,693	+419,702	+9.7	Greenpatch Inc
11.		Mobile	12,959,209	+418,304	+3.3	Facebook
12.		How Well Do You Know Me?	10,061,070	+409,653	+4.2	How Well Do You Know Me?
13.		YoVille	18,917,129	+381,688	+2.1	Zynga
14.		My Fishbowl	5,143,462	+374,545	+7.9	TwoFishes Interactive
15.		Country Story	7,425,779	+373,398	+5.3	Playfish
16.		Animal Hunter	834,871	+364,213	+77.4	6 waves limited
17.		Restaurant City	16,200,404	+321,128	+2.0	Playfish
18.		Fortune Products	1,041,519	+314,798	+43.3	QuoteMountain.com
19.		Slide FunSpace	10,211,594	+266,791	+2.7	Slide, Inc.
20.		開心農場	3,761,044	+264,965	+7.6	ELEX

Indeed, Facebook’s platform has experienced a number of technical issues over the last couple of days that appears to have delayed reporting on many apps. The problems may have also made it so users weren’t able to access apps at all, in some cases, thereby depressing numbers on this week’s top 20 fastest-growing list.

In any case, coming in second is FarmVille, Zynga’s previous big hit. Until Café World launched, its growth was setting industry records — and it is still going strong, having gained 2.42 million users to reach 56.1 million monthly actives.

At number 3 is simple quiz-creator app Quizzer. It grew 1.02 million to reach 6.26 million monthly active users, following weeks of solid growth.

Status Statistics, an app that analyzes you and your friends’ status updates for interesting trends, also once again made it to the top 5. It grew 824,000 to reach 2.88 million, moving up from the fifth to the fourth spot this week.

And, at number 5, Causes continued its weeks-long steady climb, gaining 717,000 to end at 31.4 million.

Also notable from further down the list: At number 11, Facebook’s own mobile app continues to grow, gaining 418,000 to total 13.0 million monthly actives.

The single fastest-growing page on Facebook this past week was clothing company LaCoste. It jumped from around 2,000 fans on October 8th to 1.11 million fans the next day. What happened? As we often see on our weekly top fastest-growing 20 pages list, Facebook appears to have rounded up all of the unofficial pages for LaCoste that people have made over the years, then redirected all of those fans to the official page.

The shear size of the jump is amazing, even though LaCoste appears to be infrequently updating its page. However, with the new fans, it appears to be slowly gaining more fans — around 500 a day, following the main surge. Moving forward, the company has a million more reasons to make the page more interesting.

	Name	Fans	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Lacoste	1,111,592	+1,109,431	+51,338.78
2.	Where the Wild Things Are	1,281,916	+871,310	+212.20
3.	Big Prize Giveaways	804,075	+402,202	+100.08
4.	Call Of Duty 4	427,097	+293,260	+219.12
5.	Slash	905,311	+244,786	+37.06
6.	Starbucks	4,506,816	+242,914	+5.70
7.	Usain Bolt	1,673,188	+183,669	+12.33
8.	Mafia Wars	4,628,411	+116,079	+2.57
9.	vitaminwater	1,053,175	+105,886	+11.18
10.	Beyoncé	2,562,115	+103,132	+4.19
11.	The Art of Travel by Louis Vuitton	739,444	+96,705	+15.05
12.	Hey Hey It’s Saturday	357,100	+82,892	+30.23
13.	Galatasaray	2,066,895	+78,234	+3.93
14.	Facebook	5,372,933	+75,622	+1.43
15.	David Guetta	1,419,275	+73,337	+5.45
16.	The Breast Cancer Site	444,578	+70,985	+19.00
17.	Celebs on Facebook	1,555,228	+70,645	+4.76
18.	Vin Diesel	6,441,638	+69,666	+1.09
19.	Detroit Tigers	196,645	+69,422	+54.57

But at number 2 on our list this week is a page that has been seeing healthy incremental growth, for the forthcoming movie Where The While Things Are. Last week, it grew by 357,000 to reach 411,000. This past week, it outdid itself, growing by 871,000 to reach 1.28 million. The movie hits theaters this Friday; we’ll be interested to see if the page helps drive box office sales.

Also seeing organic growth is the page for Slash, the guitarist formerly with Guns N’ Roses. His page grew by 151,000 fans to reach 660,000 last week. This week, it grew 245,000 to reach 905,000, putting it at number 5 on the list. We’re not sure why the growth is happening — other than that there are a lot of Slash fans on Facebook who are just now discovering the page.

Starbucks, a long-time top contender on our PageData service, also continues to see more growth. It grew 243,000 to reach 4.51 million fans.

Vitaminwater, meanwhile, passed the 1 million fan mark on the back of its multi-stage marketing campaign to crowdsource the selection of a new beverage flavor. The Coca-Cola-owned company announced that flavor last week — “Black-cherry lime” — and now it’s running a contest to design the bottle label. It has been running television commercials, and other media promotion, which contributed to the 106,000 fans it added last week to total 1.05 million.

Check out the top headlines and insights this week from Inside Social Game, where we track all the latest developments at the intersection of games and social platforms. Especially notable stories included IMVU’s revenue growth, a possible Playdom funding and Zynga’s Café World going from 0 to 8.6 million users in a week.

And, on a related note, get ready for our Inside Virtual Goods report coming next week.

Monday, October 5, 2009

Baseball Superstars 2010 is Odd and Addictive
Preview: Sniper Vs Sniper Online
IMVU’s Road To Riches Already Paved with Virtual Goods
Virtual Environments, Chinese Developers Among Top 20 Facebook Games This Week

Tuesday, October 6, 2009

A Playdom Funding Would Mean No Quick Exit
Mixpanel’s Real-Time Analytics Show How Social Games Grow and Die
Announcing Inside Virtual Goods: Tracking the US Virtual Goods Market, 2009 – 2010
PopCap Moves Deeper into Social Gaming with $22.5M Round

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

Friendster’s Future to Include Social Gaming Focus
Touch Pets: Dogs — Ngmoco Aims to Take Virtual Pets Genre to Next Level
FarmVille Users Grow Virtual Goods, Raise $320,000 for Charity
Habbo Owner Sulake to Lay Off 40 Employees

Thursday, October 8, 2009

Meet Plinga, Apparently Zynga’s German Copycat
Zynga’s Café World Goes from 0 to 8.6 Million Users in a Week, with Big Implications
See You at Virtual Goods Summit 2009 in San Francisco
GratisPay Announces Samwer Brothers, Holtzbrinck Funding, Social Gaming Focus

Friday, October 9, 2009

AdNectar Brings its Branded Virtual Goods to Twitter and LiveJournal
Top 20 Up-and-Coming Facebook Games: Animal Hunter, Jungle Jewels, Quiztastic
Is Appointment Gaming Where the Money Is?
Social Gaming Roundup: OpenFeint+Digital Chocolate, iPhone Gaming, FarmVille Protest, ljji Growth

Last February, Facebook settled a long-running set of lawsuits with erstwhile rival ConnectU, in a cash-and-stock payment for what was basically a purchase of ConnectU. But the year before, ConnectU founders Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss and Divya Narendra had dismissed the law firm representing them, Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges. The settlement money, reportedly $65 million in cash and stock, was put in escrow for the ConnectU founders and the firm to divvy up. Quinn Emanual immediately put a lien on the money, meaning the founders have not been able to receive any of it yet.

In the two cases, the ConnectU founders first sued Facebook, alleging that founder Mark Zuckerberg had used code and knowledge gained while working with ConnectU in order to create Facebook; then, Facebook countersued.

So now, even though Facebook itself is basically out of the picture, the court cases continue — sort of. The ConnectU founders are trying to get their money, but in order to do so, they apparently need access to documents used in the settled cases to use against Quinn Emanuel. The problem is that those documents have been sealed.

On September 30th, Douglas P. Woodlock, the judge hearing one of the cases, in Massachusetts, entered a memorandum and order asking the court clerk to stay the case and terminate all outstanding motions, although the order left the possibility open of further motions.

On October 8th, the Winklevoss brothers (who are also Olympic rowers) and Narendra went back to court, apparently trying to use some sealed documents in their case against Quinn Emaneul. It is not clear how that effort will go. In the meantime, we wonder if the US government is going to be looking for taxes on the settlement money they were going to receive.

[image via Zimbio]

Among the 98 countries we track that have Facebook users, only three actually lost more users than they gained in September. They were China, Iceland and Cyprus. The reasons for the losses vary.

Most obviously, Facebook has been blocked in China since July — at that point it had around 1 million users. Sure, there are proxy servers and other ways of accessing the site, but very few people apparently have the ability and the desire to do so. There are a lot of extremely popular domestic sites with social networking features, after all, such as Tencent. Based on our latest Global Monitor report, Facebook’s monthly active users in the country dropped from 41,000 monthly active users as of the beginning of September to 14,000 as of the beginning of this month.

Iceland, with a population of around 300,000 people, has the highest Facebook penetration rate of any country in the world. Over the course of August, 49.5% of its population was on the site. In September, 260 fewer people logged on. Basically, that difference is a rounding error. So it appears Facebook has maxed out its growth in the country. It continues to have the highest penetration in the world, as 49.4% have stayed active on the site.

Cyprus has the most peculiar situation of the three countries. It had 252,000 users in August, but 223,000 users in September. It had previously grown by 149,000 users in the past year. Google News doesn’t reveal any sort of anti-Facebook backlash, and we haven’t heard anything, otherwise. Readers, let us know if you have any idea of what’s going on.

[Image via www.emu.edu.tr]

Facebook has continued its US surge, according to Hitwise, having grown its market share from 55.2% of all social networks in August to 58.6% last month. That’s a a 194 percent increase over September, 2008, when it had 19.9% of the market. Other social networks also saw some meaningful changes. MySpace dropped from 33.0% in August to 30.2% last month, while Twitter fell from 1.95% to 1.84%. The report’s data on Facebook roughly matches up with our own data about the site, showing that it grew 8.6% to 88.3 million monthly active users in September.

However, Twitter has grown 1170% since September of last year, it has shown strong underlying growth statistics among new users, and appears to have caught on with millions of teens. Meanwhile, MySpace continues to get the most time on site, with users averaging 25:56 minutes on it per month — although Facebook appears to be catching up in that area, having increased time on site by 23% over the previous September to 23:00 while MySpace has fallen 12%, year-over-year.

Also on the list are social networks Tagged, which rose slighty from 2.36% to 2.38% between August and September, and teen social network myYearbook, which fell from 1.16% to 1.05%.

Meanwhile, Facebook also appears to still be gaining older demographics, at MySpace’s expense.

Social games may be dominating the top of the application charts on AppData, but the fastest-growing apps with between 100,000 and 1 million users show a broader mix. This past week, as in many previous ones, it has been a mix of simple quiz and gifting apps, many focused on specific languages, cultures and religions, with a smattering of rising games in the mix.

		Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %	Developer
1.		Animal Hunter	786,127	+575,904	+274.0	—
2.		Jungle Jewels	900,423	+226,369	+33.6	GameDuell
3.		O-Meter App Factory	557,312	+223,151	+66.8	3happybytes
4.		Who was i, in my past life ?	216,115	+206,608	+2 173.2	Nikolas Chalkidis A
5.		Quiztastic!	833,167	+151,151	+22.2	Playfish
6.		Birthday Countdown	653,265	+144,059	+28.3	Internet Design Zone
7.		How Sexy Is Your Name Calculator	401,513	+132,449	+49.2	Internet Design Zone
8.		Superfan	738,384	+121,679	+19.7	SuperFan.com
9.		Which Car suits your Personality?	566,827	+103,988	+22.5	Gaurav Kapahi
10.		Trivias Locas – Trivias, encuestas y tests	583,331	+96,887	+19.9	3happybytes
11.		Chain Rxn	929,287	+90,019	+10.7	Zwigglers
12.		Who Were You In A Past Life?	357,900	+67,406	+23.2	a
13.		QUE CLASE DE MAMA ERES	278,429	+60,336	+27.7	Clara Carolina Martinez Junge
14.		Tetris Friends	726,255	+59,023	+8.9	Tetris Online, Inc
15.		Your Zodiac Profile	169,585	+52,933	+45.4	Internet Design Zone
16.		My Family	709,265	+50,685	+7.7	FamilyLink.com
17.		Chakpak Movies	817,961	+48,279	+6.3	Chakpak Media
18.		Pirates of the World	875,634	+41,109	+4.9
19.		Fairyland	319,441	+40,899	+14.7	Play and Connect Ltd
20.		What do they say about me?	538,628	+38,937	+7.8	3happybytes

At the top are two games, both of the puzzle variety. Number one is Animal Hunter, with 576,000 new users to reach 786,000 monthly active users. Although the game is available in 9 languages, most of its fans appear to be Chinese speakers. No developer is listed, although it appears to be cross-promoting apps from Hong Kong developer 6 Waves.

Jungle Jewels, made by GameDuell and patterned after PopCap’s classic Bejeweled game, grew by 226,000 to reach 900,000. Both games were on our up-and-coming list last week, as well, but given this growth we expect them to have moved up and off of it next week. Other games on the list include: Tetris Friends, made by Tetris Online Inc; Playfish‘s Quiztastic; and virtual world Fairyland, from Play and Connect Ltd.

But most apps on the list, as usual, were not games. As in recent weeks, Argentinian developer shop 3happybytes has a few apps on the up-and-coming list. Three, this time, including app creator O-Meter App Factory at number three. It gained 223,000 to reach 557,000. Since massive growth last month, 3happybyte’s simple-app empire has stayed relatively steady at nearly 30 million monthly active users.

Another simple-app developer, Internet Design Zone, also has three apps on today’s list. The company makes a number of simple web sites and apps, and has been seeing a surge on Facebook since early August. With 43 apps, that we know of, it has reached 1.92 million monthly actives as of today, by far its highest mark in the last 90 days. Its up-and-coming apps include Birthday Countdown at number 6, How Sexy Is Your Name Calculator at number 7 and Your Zodiac Profile at number 15.

We’re also seeing international apps on today’s list, although not as many as in past weeks. Some culture or religion-specific apps tend to surge around particular holidays (see the burst of Ramadan-related gifting apps last month, for example), so the lack of worldwide holidays now may explain the drop. Another reason is that many of these apps are available in more than one language, as is the case with Animal Hunter. In any case, today’s list includes: 3happybytes Trivias Locas – Trivias, encuestas y tests at number 10, QUE CLASE DE MAMA ERES by a person named Clara Carolina Martinez Junge, and Indian movie app Chakpak Movies made by Chakpak Media.

Germany and Austria have far smaller populations of Facebook users than many other European countries, but that is starting to change, and fast — both countries made our list of the top ten fastest-growing in the region yesterday. Here’s a closer look at what’s happening.

Germany, a country with 82.1 million people, grew by 541,000 Facebook users over the course of last month to reach 4.36 million monthly actives. Austria is ten times smaller, with a population of 8.34 million — but it also grew by 14 percent, gaining 129,000 users to reach 1.03 million.

This means that even though Germany is much larger numerically, Facebook has only penetrated 5.3% of the population. Meanwhile, 12.3% of Austrians are now using the site every month.

It is especially meaningful that Facebook is getting this growth in the German-speaking part of the region, because it faces an entrenched incumbent: A clone of Facebook called studiVZ. Facebook sued the company last year for copying it to the degree that it merely replaced “Facebook’s blue colour scheme with a red one.” Facebook was “seeking to end StudiVZ’s illegal activity to ensure that users are not confused and that Facebook’s reputation remains unharmed.” The suit was settled out of court a month ago. At the time, we noted Facebook was growing fast in Germany; while we don’t have fresh data on studiVZ’s traffic, last we heard in April, it was around 5.5. million. In other words, studiVZ does not appear to have a dominant share of its home market, and Facebook is now growing in the middle of it.

Time will tell if studiVZ has differentiated itself well enough as a German-language social network to be able to hold its own versus what we expect to be Facebook’s continued growth among the 105 million native German speakers in the world. For a visual aid, check out the map of German speakers in Europe, below.

[Update: As commenters add, below, studiVZ has three different sites that apparently add up to more than 15 million users. That's at least more of the market, although it would be helpful to see current monthly active user stats for these properties.]

[Photo of a German town taken from Austria by Luiz Felipe Castro on Flickr; German language map via Wikimedia.]

In a small but interesting use of Facebook Connect, Campbell’s Soup has been running a contest site with the Coaching Association of Canada to first find a “Most Valuable Coach” then award the winner $25,000. Under the “Campbell’s Chunky” soup brand, the site uses Connect to send activities back into Facebook.

And it’s been working well. Although the site has only gotten less than 10,000 visits since the campaign launched, nearly 27 percent of the traffic came from Facebook, according to Filemobile, a Toronto social media software company that has been helping to run the campaign.

The site lets people browse a roster of 300 coaches, nominate their own (more than 100 coaches have been nominated so far), and leave testimonials about their favorite ones. Through Connect, activities including signing up for the site, becoming a fan of a coach, or leaving a testimonial will send information back to users’ profiles and their friends’ news feeds on Facebook. Out of all the Facebook traffic, 75% is the result of people clicking on feed or profile stories, while another 5% is from email notifications sent to Facebook friends from the site.

This is not a huge implementation of Connect, but it is a significant addition to the campaign — and that’s what matters.