Inside Facebook

This is our second edition of our top 20 applications that gained the most daily active users in the past week. We’re taking a close look at the DAU metric because it gives an idea of whether users keep engaging with an app (and maybe making its developers money). The monthly active users measure, on the other hand, shows the more general growth trajectory of an app, but includes users who only use an app once, or on rare occasions.

A further useful metric can be gleaned when we divide DAU by MAU. This gives us the “stickiness”, or the percentage of all users who tend to come back over time. This retention factor figures heavily in the growth and success of apps. We’ve explained in depth why a stickiness of over 15% is important at our sister site, Inside Social Gaming.

You can also find the stats below over at AppData, along with growth graphs for individual apps and developers.

A Plateful of Cranberries

As usual, many of the top 20 applications are new to the leaderboard — and some are most likely to be replaced by other shooting stars next week. Among the apps with long-term growth potential, you may notice a marked difference from last week’s DAU rankings: each one has gained fewer daily users.

To an extent, this drop in growth may be the result of high-flying new apps like Fishville (the top gainer both weeks) aging a bit and slowing their growth. Last week, Fishville gained 4.8 million DAUs; this week, it picked up only 1.1 million. But more broadly, Facebook users may just busy with their Thanksgiving vacation.

There’s one notable departure from the leaderboard: Farmville, which has actually dropped some daily users since last week. The app has lost fewer than 200,000 daily users, but it could be that its growth trajectory, already slowed dramatically, is finally leveling off. However, another aging Zynga app, Texas Holdem, has stepped in with some new growth.

Here are the rankings:

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	FishVille	6,302,573	+1,148,805	+18.23
2.	Happy Pets	1,357,897	+541,826	+39.90
3.	Café World	10,319,129	+431,134	+4.18
4.	Fish Isle	353,081	+300,951	+85.24
5.	Happy Aquarium	7,974,860	+255,647	+3.21
6.	Farm Town	5,481,339	+230,973	+4.21
7.	RockYou Live	447,353	+196,343	+43.89
8.	Ultimate Slot Machines	192,468	+192,467	+100.00
9.	Snowball Fight	404,473	+176,672	+43.68
10.	Champions Online	148,666	+148,649	+99.99
11.	Give Hearts	968,361	+130,156	+13.44
12.	Texas HoldEm Poker	4,489,307	+115,527	+2.57
13.	建立你的測驗	119,645	+107,836	+90.13
14.	Marketplace	198,121	+90,386	+45.62
15.	Island Paradise	1,922,376	+87,014	+4.53
16.	Travel Balloon	107,931	+83,359	+77.23
17.	Christmas Cheer	160,633	+82,132	+51.13
18.	Zoo World	345,961	+76,541	+22.12
19.	Death´s Time	107,509	+61,889	+57.57
20.	Quiz Planet!	307,075	+60,652	+19.75

As with last week, the top gaining apps are all games. And the decline in new DAU seems fairly consistent, with apps (or their ranked positions on the leaderboard) coming in with a third to half less DAU growth than last week. There are only two big exceptions.

One is Happy Pets, which is coming into its second week. It went from almost 99% growth to about 40%. Fishville saw a more precipitous decline in DAU growth, from 92% to 18%. As these apps grow, it’s inevitable that some users won’t come back every day.

Besides all the games, the growing trend seems to be holiday apps; two are Snowball Fight and, what else but Christmas Cheer. (Sexy Santa Helpers almost made it in, at #22.) This reflects a real world tradition — retailers really start gearing up for Christmas about a month before. At least Facebook can’t put Christmas music on an endless loop.

This is a guest post by Chris Morrison