Games, charity, in-store marketing and giveaways characterized our campaigns this week. Innocent Drinks and Hastsune Miku Fashions created branded games, Target and Walgreens offered users deals and value, Grand Marnier harnessed the holiday season with a charity app and Clarins is giving away a spa weekend. Below is an excerpt of this week’s full Featured Facebook Campaigns entry in the Facebook Marketing Bible, which also includes detailed breakdowns of over 100 other Facebook marketing campaigns by top-performing brands and other organization on Facebook.

Innocent Drinks’ Fruit Picker Game

Goal: Page Growth, Network Exposure, Brand Loyalty

Method: Innocent Drinks’ Fruit Picker Game involves users in trying to gather the fruit to make the juice for the company. Playing the game generates a ticker story and scores may be published to the feed.

Core Mechanic: The game is tightly wound into the idea that Innocent Drinks is a fun, simple, healthy product. Users must play a simple, fun game to help pickers deliver the fruit for the juice. Users then my collect badges to share with friends on Facebook and may win prizes, such as an iPad 2.

Impact: The Page has 209,000 Likes and PageData shows relatively steady growth.

Clarins’ Spa Life Photo Contest

Goal: Engagement, Page Growth, Product Purchase, Brand Loyalty

Method: Clarins created a game, Spa Life, where users build their own virtual spa, and then enter to win a spa trip by submitting a photo of their spa created within the game.

Core Mechanic: Users play the Spa Life game, then take a photo of their spa from within the game, then upload that to the contest page. By getting others users to vote on their photo, users may win the spa getaway. The photo with the most votes wins.

Impact: The Clarins Page has 137,900 Likes with steady growth, according to PageData. The promotion is very involved, tightly branded and allows for good opportunities for network exposure, since users have to share to win.

Want to learn how top brands are designing their Facebook marketing campaigns? See the Facebook Marketing Bible for detailed breakdowns of hundreds of Featured Campaigns by top-performing brands and businesses on Facebook.

Gowalla confirmed that its co-founders plus other key team members are moving west to work at Facebook on product and engineering. Facebook did not acquire the Gowalla product or the technology behind it and did not disclose how many Gowalla employees will be joining the company.

This looks like a classic talent acquisition where Facebook picks up a handful of product managers, designers and engineers and shuts down the startup’s original products. CNN reported on Friday that the Gowalla team was being hired to work on Timeline. However, Facebook did not say what product they would be transitioned to working on. It’s sometimes the case that the people who Facebook acquires work on products that are very different from what their startups were centered upon.

As we said on Friday, Gowalla reportedly had a $28.4 million post-money valuation after its most recent round of funding. It’s doubtful, although not certain, that the price was higher than that, since this was a team — and not product — acquisition.

The Austin-based company launched as a location-sharing service back in 2009 but never got the same sort of traction that New York-based rival Foursquare saw. Today, we can see that the Gowalla app has 10,000 daily active users connected to Facebook against Foursquare’s 560,000 daily actives. Facebook also has its location product Places, which it changed a few months ago to scrap the check-in feed from its mobile platform. Instead, Facebook users must add a city location or tag a specific Place in their Wall or Timeline posts.

Gowalla pivoted earlier this year too, changing its check in-centric app to one that is like a crowdsourced local and travel guide.

Here’s Facebook’s statement:

We’re excited to confirm that Gowalla co-founders Josh Williams and Scott Raymond, along with other members of the Gowalla team, are moving to Facebook in January to join our design and engineering teams. In talking with the Gowalla team, we realized that we share many of the same goals: building great products that reach millions of people, making a big impact quickly, and creating new ways for people to connect and share what’s going on in their lives. While Facebook isn’t acquiring the Gowalla service or technology, we’re sure that the inspiration behind Gowalla will make its way into Facebook over time.

Here’s Gowalla’s co-founder’s statement published in the company blog today:

Three years ago Gowalla’s journey began when I took a photograph of Lake Tahoe on my iPhone. I had just finished a phone call with my dad, and I wanted nothing more than to share that photo and place with him. Not just in a text message or status update sort of way, but with a bit of weight that said “I wish you were here” and “this moment and place are meaningful to me.”
 
We created Gowalla to inspire people to go out and share those places, photos and stories. The past three years have been quite the journey, oft-times in a very literal sense!
 
The Gowalla Passport has become a record of all the places we’ve visited, the people we were with, the photos we took, and the stories we told. Many of you even use Gowalla like a scrapbook of sorts — a place to keep all those memories.
 
About two months ago, my co-founder Scott and I attended F8. We were blown away by Facebook’s new developments. A few weeks later Facebook called, and it became clear that the way for our team to have the biggest impact was to work together. So we’re excited to announce that we’ll be making the journey to California to join Facebook!
 
Gowalla, as a service, will be winding down at the end of January. We plan to provide an easy way to export your Passport data, your Stamp and Pin data (along with your legacy Item data), and your photos as well. Facebook is not acquiring Gowalla’s user data.
 
We know how much many of you loved Gowalla. It’s been the highlight of our lives as we’ve built it with your help over the past two years. As we move forward, we hope some of the inspiration behind Gowalla — a fun and beautiful way to share your journey on the go — will live on at Facebook.
 
We’re so very grateful for the support of our community, our investors, our families, and, of course, the City of Austin as well. You’ve all played a special role in seeing us to this day.

Newspaper readers topped our list of the fastest growing Facebook applications by monthly active users this week, there were also tabs, friend quizzes, Spotify, Pandora, virtual gifts and more. The titles on our list gained the most MAU of any apps on the platform, growing from between 300,000 and 8 million MAU, based on AppData, our data tracking service covering traffic growth for apps on Facebook.

Top Gainers This Week

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	CastleVille	25,400,000	+8,000,000	+46%
2.	The Independent	2,600,000	+1,100,000	+86%
3.	Washington Post Social Reader	4,700,000	+1,100,000	+31%
4.	Fortune Cookie	1,700,000	+700,000	+70%
5.	Static Iframe Tab	28,200,000	+700,000	+3%
6.	Bubble Witch Saga	9,200,000	+600,000	+7%
7.	Profile Banner (all languages)	2,200,000	+600,000	+38%
8.	YouTube	3,900,000	+600,000	+18%
9.	21 questions	11,400,000	+500,000	+5%
10.	Spotify	9,500,000	+500,000	+7%
11.	Static IFRAME Tab : ThumbsUp Icon	5,400,000	+500,000	+10%
12.	Yahoo!	19,700,000	+500,000	+3%
13.	Tetris Battle	7,900,000	+400,000	+7%
14.	21 Preguntas	560,000	+380,000	+211%
15.	Gem Rush	510,000	+360,000	+240%
16.	*Smiles	1,600,000	+300,000	+23%
17.	Between You and Me	4,300,000	+300,000	+8%
18.	JibJab	1,700,000	+300,000	+21%
19.	Pandora	9,300,000	+300,000	+3%
20.	PokeristClub	2,000,000	+300,000	+18%

The Independent topped our list with 1.1 million MAU with Washington Post Social Reader right up there with the same, 1.1 million MAU; these apps generate feed and ticker stories when users read stories post via the apps. Page tab apps this week included Static Iframe Tab with 700,000 MAU and Static IFRAME Tab : ThumbsUp Icon with 500,000 MAU.

Friend quizzes that ask users to answer questions about their friends made the list, generating feed stories with answers and ticker stories with use of the app. 21 questions grew by 500,000 MAU, 21 Preguntas grew by 380,000 MAU and Between You and Me by 300,000 MAU. Music apps this week included Spotify by 500,000 MAU and Pandora by 300,000 MAU.

Virtual gifting apps Fortune Cookie 700,000 MAU and *Smiles grew by 300,000 MAU. Then Profile Banner (all languages) grew by 600,000 MAU; these apps usually generate a ticker story and feed story, publishing a photo album to the stream while the photo album becomes a unified image across the top of user’s profile. YouTube grew by 600,000 MAU, Yahoo by 500,000 MAU and this JibJab by 300,000 MAU.

All data in this post comes from our traffic tracking service, AppData. Stay tuned for our look at the top weekly gainers by daily active users on Wednesday, and the top emerging apps on Friday.

The Inside Network Job Board is dedicated to providing you with the best job opportunities across social and mobile application platforms.

Here are this week’s highlights from the Inside Network Job Board, including positions at W3i, Acquinity Interactive, Live World, Electronic Arts, SiXiTS New Media, Natural Motion Games, King.com, Deep Fried Gaming and 6waves Lolapps.

• Online Media Buyer
• Online Marketing Manager
• Campaign Analyst

• Technical Director, Mobile

• Senior Flash ActionScript Software Engineer

• Customer Acquisition Manager
• Lead Programmer
• Design Lead / Manager

• Product Performance Manager, Skillgames – King.com
• Senior Systems Developer, Skillgames – King.com
• Front end Developer, Skillgames – King.com

• Product Manager

• Product Manager for Popular Social Gaming Company
• Support Engineer – Browser and Social Games

Listings on the Inside Network Job Board are distributed to readers of Inside Social Games, Inside Facebook and Inside Mobile Apps through regular posts and widgets on the sites. Your open positions are being seen by the leading developers, product managers, marketers, designers, and executives in the Facebook Platform and social gaming industry today.

A roundup of all the news Inside Network brought you between November 28th and December 4th

Inside Mobile Apps

Tracking the convergence of mobile apps, social platforms and virtual goods. 

Monday, November 28th:

• Free Version of Gamevil’s Cartoon Wars: Gunner Hits App Store
• Emerging Top Paid iOS Apps: Charlie Brown, Star Wars and Rat on A Snowboard
• Zynga’s Fruitless Attempts at a Big Ticket Acquisition in Mobile? A Closer Look
• App Marketing Network W3i Opens $10M in Funding, Credits to Developers

Tuesday, November 29th:

• New CTIA-ESRB Ratings For Mobile Apps May Not Have Teeth Without Apple, Google
• Ahead of Its IPO, Zynga to Kick Off Investor Roadshow Next Week
• Announcing Inside Virtual Goods: Tracking the US Virtual Goods Market 2011 – 2012
• Emerging Top Grossing iOS Apps: Blood & Glory, Dream Zoo and Battle Nations
• Glu’s Blood & Glory Enters The Free-to-Play Fighting Arena on iOS
• EA’s Next Version of Tetris Will Experiment With an Optional Membership Model

Wednesday, November 30th:

• Slide Soccer from Ludei Offers a Freemium Tabletop Sports Experience on iOS
• Emerging Free iOS Apps: Monster Magic, FairyFail and the Merry Manor
• Cost of Acquiring Users For iOS Apps Slips as Downloads Hit a Record
• New This Week on the Inside Network Job Board: EA, SiXiTS, Natural Motion and More
• Unity Gets 750,000 Registered Developers For Gaming Platform
• New Speakers Confirmed for Inside Social Apps 2012 – February 8th and 9th in San Francisco
• Tapjoy Actively Explores a Sale With Zynga, Japanese Giants DeNA & GREE as Candidates

Thursday, December 1st:

• Zynga to Lower Prospective Valuation to $10B For IPO Amid Economic Uncertainty
• Crowdstar Moves to Android with Limited Kindle Fire Exclusivity for Top Girl
• PapayaMobile and Sega Team for Android Exclusive Fallen Realms
• Smule’s Acquisition of Khush Creates 30M Download Music App Empire
• New Hires in Mobile: Gameloft, GREE and InMobi
• Emerging Android Apps: Blood & Glory, ChuChu Rocket and Sleepy Jack

Friday, December 2nd: 

• Zynga Boosts Amount it May Raise in IPO to $1.15B at a $5.9 to $7B Valuation
• Facebook Poaches a Head of Mobile Developer Relations From Sencha
• Zen Pinball from Zen Studios Makes the Move from PlayStation 3 to iOS
• Facebook Reportedly Acquires Gowalla, No Confirmation From Either Company
• Mobile App Roundup: RIM, Angry Birds Hunt For Pistachios, Burstly Funding

Inside Social Games

Covering all the latest developments at the intersection of games and social platforms.

Monday, November 28th:

• CastleVille, Bubble Witch Saga Lead This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Facebook Games by MAU
• SNS Plus Lands $4M Round From WI Harper Group, Matrix Partners
• Zynga Finally Unveils Indiana Jones Adventure World

Tuesday, November 29th:

• Facebook’s Top 5 Player vs. Player Strategy Games by Traffic, With Gameplay Analysis
• Tetris Online’s Feevo Blaze for Facebook Adds Some Heat to Puzzle Game Recipes
• Announcing Inside Virtual Goods: Tracking the US Virtual Goods Market 2011 – 2012
• Zynga to Kick Off Its IPO Roadshow Next Week
• Disney Playdom Sunsetting Social City After 21 Months and 12 Million MAU

Wednesday, November 30th:

• CastleVille and The Sims Social Head to Head on This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Facebook Games by DAU
• Nival Invests in HTML5 Proficient Bytex to Fuel Pivot into Mobile, Social Gaming
• Puzzle Adventures from Ravensburger Wants its Piece of the Facebook Puzzle Game Action
• New This Week on the Inside Network Job Board: King.com, Deep Fried, Lolapps and More
• EA Playfish After The Sims Social: Risk, Mobile, and Sims Expansions
• New Speakers Confirmed for Inside Social Apps 2012 – February 8th and 9th in San Francisco
• EA to Acquire KlickNation as it Moves Into Core Gaming on Facebook

Thursday, December 1st:

• Tapjoy Actively Explores a Sale With Zynga, Japanese Giants DeNA & GREE as Candidates
• Zynga to Lower Prospective Valuation to $10B For IPO Amid Economic Uncertainty
• Zynga Snags Sony’s Rob Dyer as Head of Partner Publishing
• Confirmed: EA Acquires KlickNation, Source Says Price is Roughly $35M
• New Hires in Social Gaming: Zynga, Tagged and Wooga

Friday, December 2nd: 

• Zynga Boosts Amount it May Raise in IPO to $1.15B at a $5.9 to $7B Valuation
• Feevo Blaze Burns Up This Week’s List of Emerging Facebook Games
• Facebook’s Top Farming Games By Traffic
• Baseball Game Homerun Heroes Goes to Bat on Facebook for 6waves Lolapps
• What’s New on Google+ Games
• Social Gaming News Roundup: Tiny Speck, Sojo Studios and Zynga

Inside Facebook

Tracking Facebook and the Facebook platform for developers and marketers.

Monday, November 28th:

• Tabs, Quizzes, Newspapers, Skype, Spotify, “Twilight” and More on This Week’s Top 20 Growing Facebook Apps by MAU
• Featured Facebook Campaigns: Toys “R” Us, Taco Cabana, “Mission Impossible,” GLAAD, Walmart, Michael Kors, Macy’s and Visa
• Facebook Adds “Related Posts” with Questions and Comments to Sponsored Stories
• Facebook Updates Bookmarks, Canvas Page Layout, Adds Secure Video Embeds
• Facebook Buys WhoGlue, But Not Its Talent

Tuesday, November 29th:

• New Facebook Platform Industry Hires: Shoutlet, Wildfire, Work4 Labs and AdParlor
• Announcing Inside Virtual Goods: Tracking the US Virtual Goods Market 2011 – 2012
• Movies, LMFAO, Target, Macy’s, Poker, Football and More on This Week’s Top 20 Growing Facebook Pages
• Facebook Settles Federal Trade Commission Charges That It Tricked Users on Privacy Settings
• Facebook Reveals Most Shared Articles in 2011

Wednesday, November 30th:

• Yahoo, Klout, Bing, Scribd, Birthdays, News and SoundCloud on This Week’s Top 20 Growing Facebook Apps by DAU
• New This Week on the Inside Network Job Board: Live World, W3i, EA and More
• Facbeook Highlighting More Early Results for Social News Apps
• TL;DR: Facebook Increases Status Update Character Limit From 5K to 60K+
• New Speakers Confirmed for Inside Social Apps 2012 – February 8th and 9th in San Francisco

Thursday, December 1st:

• Social Media Tracking Platform awe.sm Closes $4.25M in Funding
• Facebook Hires and Departures: Engineering, Recruiting, Sales and More
• Facebook Now Directing Typeahead Search Traffic Straight to Apps
• Facebook Careers Postings: Engineering, Mobile, HR, Marketing and More
• Facebook Marketing Showcase: Cosmetic Brands Want To Get You All Made-Up
• The Facebook Marketing Bible December 2011 Edition Is Now Available
• The Top 25 Facebook Games of December 2011

Friday, December 2nd: 

• Christmas Apps, Photos, Ustream Live, Horoscopes, Store Locator and More on This Week’s Top 20 Emerging Facebook Apps by MAU
• Facebook Opening Engineering Office in New York City In 2012
• Facebook Roundup: Privacy, Gambling, Mobile, Spotify, WashPo Reader and More
• Facebook Reportedly Acquires Gowalla, No Confirmation From Either Company

Facebook is reportedly acquiring location sharing service Gowalla and bringing “most” of its employees and founder Josh Williams over to Palo Alto headquarters to work on Timeline, according to CNN. We could not get confirmation from Facebook, Gowalla or several investors in the company at this time. Facebook spokesperson Jonathan Thaw said the company doesn’t comment on rumors or speculation.

The Austin-based company launched as a location-sharing service back in 2009 but never got the same sort of traction that New York-based rival Foursquare saw. Today, we can see that the Gowalla app has 10,000 daily active users connected to Facebook against Foursquare’s 560,000 daily actives. Facebook also has its location product Places, which it changed a few months ago to scrap the check-in feed from its mobile platform. Instead, Facebook users must add a city location or tag a specific Place in their Wall or Timeline posts.

Gowalla pivoted earlier this year too, changing its check in-centric app to one that is like a crowdsourced local and travel guide.

The company has raised around $10.4 million in two rounds of funding with investors including Kevin Rose, Chris Sacca, Jason Calacanis, Shervin Pishevar, Gary Vaynerchuk, Ron Conway along with venture firms like Greylock Partners, Shasta Ventures, Founders Fund and Floodgate.

Given the amount of money the company raised, Facebook would have had to pay somewhere around $30 million or so for investors to have made their money back. In 2009, TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington reported that the company’s post-money valuation was $28.4 million at the time of the second venture round. Given Gowalla’s lack of traction plus how aggressively Facebook’s valuation is priced in within private secondary markets, it’s unclear whether this deal would make investors whole.

If this was a pure talent acquisition, we would expect to see Facebook shutdown the standalone Gowalla app too.

Europe Stifling Facebook’s Targeted Ads – The European Union is set to enact legislation to ban some avenues Facebook uses to create targeted ads, specifically by making Facebook be more transparent about what user data it’s collecting.

Spotify Opens Platform to Developers – Spotify announced the company would open its platform to app developers to include things like reviews and song lyrics, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Facebook May Allow Gambling in UK - Facebook is exploring opening up the platform to gambling in the United Kingdom, according to TechCrunch, maybe as soon as 2012.

Mobile Channels Pushing Traffic for SNAP Interactive - SNAP Interactive told TechCrunch that Facebook’s recently launched mobile channels have given the company’s apps a “significant” traffic boost.

WashPo Reader Boasts 3.5M Users – The Washington Post Social Reader now boasts more than 3.5 million subscribers, according to a company statement. The growth came in just two months and is especially popular with users under 35, 83% to be exact.

Other Announcements:

Liquidus Releases Socialink 2.0 - Liquidus released the new version of its marketing application for car retailers, Socialink 2.0. New features include video integrations.

Secure.me App Protects Users on Facebook – Secure.me is an app that protects users from over-sharing or phishing from viruses on Facebook.

Facebook sent out a press release this morning announcing plans to open an engineering office in New York City during 2012. A 2pm EST video press conference regarding the move features remarks from NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Senator Charles E. Schumer and Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg.

Rather than functioning as a satellite studio, the NYC office will be a core engineering hub for the social network. It’s being headed by Facebook’s Serkan Piantino, who previously served on the News Feed engineering team and built the infrastructure for Timeline and now managing the teams behind Messages and Chat. Facebook’s Jay Parikh, who currently oversees Facebook’s infrastructure team, will function as the executive sponsor for the office.

A driving theme of the press conference is the creation of new jobs in New York City. Sandberg also highlighted opportunities for women in the tech space. Mayor Bloomberg and Senator Schumer also stressed the vision of New York City as a tech hub, which challenges to the popular view of the East Coast as the home of traditional businesses like print media and banking. Senator Schumer claims New York City is now just behind San Francisco and ahead of Boston, MA in volume of tech companies.

Facebook opened new headquarters in Menlo Park, CA over the summer as well as additional offices abroad. Job listings for Facebook’s NYC office can be found here. The office currently has 100 people, consisting mainly of non-engineers. Facebook also runs its global sales out of a different New York office set up in 2007.

Christmas applications, Connect integration, horoscopes, Page tabs, and photos made up our list this week. The apps on our list grew from between 110,000 and 260,000 MAU, based on AppData, our data tracking service covering traffic growth for apps on Facebook. We define emerging applications as those that ended with between 100,000 and 1 million MAU in the past week.

Top Gainers This Week

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Feevo Blaze	630,000	+260,000	+70%
2.	Gem Rush	320,000	+220,000	+220%
3.	Storage Wars: The Game	300,000	+210,000	+233%
4.	9GAG	780,000	+170,000	+28%
5.	lil	270,000	+170,000	+170%
6.	TubeHero	650,000	+160,000	+33%
7.	Voxer Walkie Talkie	500,000	+160,000	+47%
8.	My Christmas Tree 2011	590,000	+140,408	+31%
9.	Merry Christmas | Feliz Navidad	170,000	+140,000	+467%
10.	Big Photo	830,000	+130,000	+19%
11.	Mi árbol de Navidad 2011	400,000	+130,000	+48%
12.	Store Locator	800,000	+130,000	+19%
13.	Fotos Superior	280,000	+120,000	+75%
14.	Static IFRAME Tab : Pin Icon	730,000	+120,000	+20%
15.	Horóscopo do Dia	920,000	+110,000	+14%
16.	Mein Weihnachtsbaum	630,000	+110,000	+21%
17.	Men vs Women	240,000	+110,000	+85%
18.	Slots Farm – Slot Machines	620,000	+110,000	+22%
19.	Ustream Live	700,000	+110,000	+19%
20.	Woobox Custom Tab | Star #2	300,000	+110,000	+58%

The list included a handful of unrelated apps, including comedy Connect app 9GAG with 170,000 MAU, lil an app for an Italian recipe Page with 170,000 MAU, Voxer Walkie Talkie messaging app with 160,000 MAU and Facebook’s Store Locator with 130,000 MAU. Horóscopo do Dia grew by 110,000 MAU, offering users the chance to receive a daily Wall post of their horoscope and generating a ticker story. Then there was Ustream Live with 110,000 MAU.

Christmas apps were already popular. My Christmas Tree 2011 grew by 140,400 MAU and lets users send friends a Christmas tree ornament in a box. Merry Christmas | Feliz Navidad grew by 140,000 MAU and published a photo with a user’s friends as ornaments, tagging them and also publishing a feed story. Mi árbol de Navidad 2011 grew by 130,000 MAU and allows users to send virtual gifts to friends. Mein Weihnachtsbaum grew by 110,000 MAU and lets users send ornaments to their friends. These apps all generated ticker stories.

Two photo apps made the list Big Photo with 130,000 MAU and Fotos Superior with 120,000 MAU. Then two Page tab apps made the list: Static IFRAME Tab : Pin Icon with 120,000 MAU and Woobox Custom Tab | Star #2 with 110,000 MAU.

All data in this post comes from our traffic tracking service, AppData. Stay tuned next week for our look at the top weekly gainers by monthly active users on Monday, the top weekly gainers by daily active users on Wednesday, and the top emerging apps on Friday.

Now that the dust has settled after Facebook’s adjustment to its method for counting active users, we take a look at the top 25 Facebook games going into December 2011.

Note: Because Facebook now rounds traffic to the thousands, our rankings now reflect ties with the letter “T” in the rank field.

We begin with the top 25 games by daily active users, which is the most effective measurement of a game’s core audience. About half of our games on the list saw losses in DAU over the last month, with the largest loss reflected in The Sims Social. That game appears to have reached its early life traffic apex right at the end of September before going into its mature state where traffic declines and the lifetime value of users rises. Note that Zynga’s Mafia Wars 2 technically suffered the “biggest loss” of DAU between November and December as it doesn’t even rank in the top 25 going into this month; on November 1, it would’ve been in the top 10 in terms of DAU. The biggest gainer was newcomer CastleVille at No.2, Zynga’s latest and so far fastest-growing game ever on Facebook while older game Top Eleven makes its debut at No.25:

Turning now to monthly active users, which is a means for gauging a game’s overall reach, we see mostly overall growth with just nine apps losing ground compared to their November numbers. The Sims Social again sees the biggest loss on the list while Mafia Wars 2 sees such a huge loss, it falls off the list completely whereas in November it would have been in the top 10. CastleVille again makes a strong showing at No.5 while Car Town returns to our rankings after a brief absence:

Other somewhat new notable games climbing the rankings for the past several months are Bubble Witch Saga, Tetris Battle, Words With Friends, and Ravenskye City. Each of these games either launched in the last four months or has spent those last four months scaling steadily to arrive in the top 25.

As for overall trends that we’ve observed in the last several months in studying our monthly top 25 rankings charts, it’s clear that “top” games now need a minimum of around 1 million DAU to place. As few as eight months ago, games could get close with around 800,000 DAU — but now there are five games in the 900,000 range, three of which didn’t make the top 25. Another trend is the relative stability of arcade and casino games. Titles like Slotomania and Diamond Dash seem like they’ll never leave this list no matter how old they get.

Join us toward the end of this month for a look back at the top Facebook games of 2011 as the calendar year draws to a close.

This post originally appeared on our sister site, Inside Social Games.