Inside Facebook

We’ve just started publishing leaderboards of the Facebook applications with the most daily active users over on AppData. Just as we have been doing posts looking at which apps have gained the most monthly active users each week, we’re going to start doing posts looking at which apps have gained the most daily active users over the course of each week.

Understanding the Numbers

Before we get in to our first daily actives post, a more thorough explanation is needed for what it means versus monthly actives. Growth in monthly actives shows the longer-term health of an app. Even the fastest-growing ones, like Zynga’s FarmVille and Café World, and CrowdStar’s Happy Aquarium, take multiple weeks to get to tens of millions of users. You have to zoom out to the monthly measure to really see these trends unfolding. By looking at weekly changes to this number, you can get a sense for where the app is headed. Also, of course, some apps don’t actually want or need a lot of daily actives to be successful.

But daily actives is generally a better metric of engagement, and so monetization. The daily active rate can vary widely based on users getting tired of some features, or getting excited about new ones, or just being more exposed to an app through Facebook advertising or cross-promotion from other apps. In other words, the changes in daily active users may fluctuate, even if an apps month-to-month trajectory is relatively smooth.

The daily actives metric matters, especially for games that offer virtual goods, because people who play every day are more likely to be spending money on virtual items – like crops in a virtual farming game, fish in a virtual aquarium game, etc. – whereas those that check out the game once or twice are much less likely to monetize. Having a lot of monthly actives but relatively few daily actives may mean the app isn’t getting many users to pay. On this last point, you can get a sense for how well an app is monetizing by also looking at its ratio of daily active users to monthly active users (DAU/MAU), which is a decent signal of an application’s retention of new users.

So monthly actives shows the overall arc of an app, daily actives shows how engaging it is, and the sticky factor shows you how well the app is maintaining if not growing its user base.

Now, let’s have a look at which apps have gained the most daily actives in the past week.

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	FishVille	5,153,768	+4,766,740	+92.49
2.	FarmVille	26,677,865	+1,819,073	+6.82
3.	Happy Pets	816,071	+805,762	+98.74
4.	Café World	9,887,995	+714,276	+7.22
5.	friend.ly	805,887	+587,676	+72.92
6.	Happy Aquarium	7,719,213	+559,529	+7.25
7.	Facebook for iPhone	8,624,108	+308,881	+3.58
8.	Translations	308,755	+308,691	+99.98
9.	Daily Sex Chance	257,713	+257,712	+100.00
10.	Snowball Fight	227,801	+187,145	+82.15
11.	Mobile	4,908,381	+170,467	+3.47
12.	Island Paradise	1,835,362	+165,499	+9.02
13.	Movies	548,549	+156,337	+28.50
14.	Diva Life	249,154	+147,639	+59.26
15.	Honesty Box	389,144	+122,011	+31.35
16.	Daily Horoscope	539,206	+118,242	+21.93
17.	Know-It-All Trivia	168,643	+112,379	+66.64
18.	Fish Life	487,029	+111,321	+22.86
19.	Fish World	2,382,371	+93,054	+3.91
20.	Bueno & Demonio ?	88,748	+87,854	+98.99

As you can see, most of the leading apps are games. Some of the top gainers are, unsurprisingly, games that have just launched — FishVille and Happy Pets have only been out for a week or two. Still, in both cases, you can see the games sticky factors dropping as they grow larger. FishVille currently has a sticky factor of 45% while Happy Pets has a sticky factor of 53%. In other words, the more time passes, relatively fewer people are playing the game every day.

It is very hard to keep engagement up on a game (as it is with anything else), which is why it’s especially impressive to see the daily actives so high for games with tens of millions of users. FarmVille has an amazing 26.7 million daily active users, or 41 percent of its total user base — it is by far the most engaging app on Facebook, that we know of. And it’s still growing, with an increase of 1.82 million daily actives in the past week.

Same goes for Café World, which is seeing its monthly actives rate level off, relatively speaking, while its daily actives (and so, its sticky factor) have taken a recent upswing, climbing to 34% since the beginning of the month. This suggests Zynga may have recently introduced another engagement-driving feature or two, or pumped in more ads, or did some new cross-promotion.

Happy Aquarium also continues to surge, although its daily actives appear to be tracking its monthly actives at a pretty consistent 28% since last month.

In the non-game category, we’re also seeing an unsurprising mix of simple apps, like quizzes, and others, like some of Facebook’s own mobile apps. All of these typically show up in our weekly posts on the apps gaining the most monthly active users.