Games and Christmas Big on This Week’s List of the Top 20 Growing Facebook Applications
This past week was the sort we’ve seen before, in terms of the 20 applications that gained the most new monthly active users on our AppData leaderboard. Social games showed up strong, as usual, led by this fall’s most recent hits: Zynga’s FishVille and CrowdStar’s Happy Pets. And, a range of simple holiday or winter-themed apps also unsurprisingly made it on.
| Name | MAU | Gain |
Gain, % | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. |  Birthday Cards |
17,631,919 | +3,869,528 | +21.95 |
| 2. |  FishVille |
24,042,146 | +3,401,193 | +14.15 |
| 3. |  Happy Pets |
7,454,109 | +2,319,930 | +31.12 |
| 4. |  FarmVille |
70,476,996 | +1,864,837 | +2.65 |
| 5. |  Christmas Cheer |
3,137,353 | +1,537,629 | +49.01 |
| 6. |  Christmas Cards! |
1,586,065 | +1,485,395 | +93.65 |
| 7. |  Snowball Fight |
3,757,182 | +1,456,873 | +38.78 |
| 8. |  Birthday Calendar |
6,377,456 | +1,385,967 | +21.73 |
| 9. |  Café World |
31,601,026 | +1,062,355 | +3.36 |
| 10. |  Fish Isle |
2,673,550 | +997,820 | +37.32 |
| 11. |  Zoo World |
4,144,008 | +965,673 | +23.30 |
| 12. |  Yearbook |
4,137,178 | +893,991 | +21.61 |
| 13. |  Christmas goodies |
980,746 | +849,513 | +86.62 |
| 14. |  Friend Quiz |
8,101,838 | +831,297 | +10.26 |
| 15. |  Country Life |
3,452,588 | +812,463 | +23.53 |
| 16. |  Mobile |
11,077,400 | +758,579 | +6.85 |
| 17. |  RockYou Live |
7,581,236 | +673,976 | +8.89 |
| 18. |  Sexy Santa Helpers |
1,295,230 | +670,597 | +51.77 |
| 19. |  21 Questions |
5,805,345 | +642,905 | +11.07 |
| 20. |  Give Hearts |
9,242,767 | +638,801 | +6.91 |
But at the top we have a classic app that for some reason had a big week: virtual gift card app Birthday Cards, from RockYou! For reasons that are not entirely clear, the app reversed weeks of gradual decline, and starting around a week ago grew by 3.87 million to reach 17.6 million MAU today.
FishVille came in a strong second, gaining 3.40 million to total 24.0 million MAU, and Happy Pets did well, too, rising by 2.32 million to 7.45 million.
And then we have the holiday apps — simple, seasonal wonders, like Christmas Cheer, Christmas Cards!, Snowball Fight, Christmas goodies and Sexy Santa Helpers. These sorts of apps show up around any sort of holiday, typically offering a du jour take on the gift-giving and poking app mechanics.
More interestingly, we also see Birthday Calendar on today’s list. This app, like Birthday Cards, started growing last week after a long decline — perhaps an unusually high number of Facebook users recently had birthdays? Speaking of RockYou, the developer has really been turning on the growth lately, with RockYou Live and Give Hearts on today’s list, along with its new game, Zoo World.
December 7th, 2009 at 10:00 am
[...] So lets take a look at the ones we haven’t see much of before. RockYou’s Zoo World, which is a game, continues to grow — a sign that the company’s new focus on gaming is going according to plan. It got 965,000 new players to end at 4.14 million; we’re not sure why, but a range of other RockYou titles are also on the upswing. [...]
December 7th, 2009 at 8:18 pm
The reason that Birthday Cards is growing so fast is that the “Zoo World” game can be played through the Birthday Cards app. In fact this was the way that I found out about the game in the first place. If you click on the tab on the right that says My Zoo – it takes you to the Zoo World page. You can play the game without even installing the Zoo World App! The question becomes – how many of “Birthday Cards” users are using it for birthday cards and how many to play Zoo World? This presents a real conundrum when trying to analyze App data.
December 9th, 2009 at 9:39 pm
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