Inside Facebook

After what appeared to be a slowdown last month, Facebook’s US growth has surged again. More than 108 million people are now using the site every month, up from nearly 103 million people before. Broken down by age and sex, men between the ages of 26 and 34 accounted for the singe largest gain, with more than 600,000 of them joining. Nearly as many women between 18 and 25 joined — 581,000 of them. These groups were followed by people joining of both genders and ages 45 and above.

While every group grew this past month, the rate of growth among younger people was slightly lower than last month. At this point we should note that we gather this data from Facebook’s self-reported advertising stats, and our ongoing analysis of it suggests that data is not always completely accurate. Nielsen, an analytics firm that has a data-sharing partnership with Facebook, recently said that the company had nearly 110 million monthly unique users in December. Other analytics firms showed even higher numbers, as we covered in detail last week. Our numbers should be taken as directionally accurate estimates. Here’s what we’re seeing.

The overall breakdown of US Facebook users continues along existing lines: About half the site is between 18 and 34 and 56% of all users are women. Now, let’s look at last month’s growth numbers.

We’re not sure why so many young women and grown men joined in this month. Lots already have, numerically speaking, so it’s likely just the usual factors, like friends getting friends to sign up.

The growth among older men and women seems a little more unusual. Older dads and grandpas have not traditionally been Facebook users, but they have been lately. About half a million men and women apiece in the 45-54 age group signed up  – mostly moms and dads, we assume. Why? It’s possible that lots of Facebook-using younger people went home for the holidays and made their parents sign up. Facebook saw massive traffic spikes around Christmas and New Year’s, according to Hitwise, and we wonder if this was when thousands of Facebook evangelists fired up the computer — or laptop, or netbook, or iPhone — and taught their relatives how Facebook works.

Now, let’s see how numerical growth translates to growth rates. You may have thought that lots of men ages 55 and above still weren’t too into Facebook — but a lot more of them have been lately. Men between 45 and 54 (dads) had the single largest percentage gain, at 10.5%, but older women and older men were right behind them, with the seemingly small grandpa gain of 202,000 actually being an 8.3% increase.

Overall, though, the growth among grown men and young women helped keep the majority of the site below the age of 34.

Many social games saw traffic stagnate or fall in December due to the usual holiday decline, if not new Facebook platform policy changes. This past month has seen some recovery.

Zynga continues to hold the top position with FarmVille; that game has managed to continue growing in the past month to reach a whopping 75.5 million monthly active users (MAU), far more than any rival.

> Continue reading on Inside Social Games.

What is it that makes Birthday Cards so dang successful? Back in September, when looked at why birthday messages are popular on Facebook, the RockYou app only had two million users. Now it has over 40 million monthly active users (MAU), and regularly appears at the top of this AppData list of top Facebook apps by MAU growth.

Our answer then was that public wall postings are valuable to both sender and receiver on Facebook in a dynamic that beats sending a Hallmark card. But there’s more to Cards — after all, it beat out its larger competitors, some of whom were ahead at one point.

RockYou has pulled a couple clever tricks with Cards, like cross-promoting the app with its game Zoo World. But we’ve got another guess at the developer’s secret sauce: they’ve built a genuinely good app. Take a look sometime. Building a custom card is actually fun, and the app also comes with features like virtual currency, gifts and a calendar to track significant occasions.

Birthday Cards is by far the biggest gainer on the list this week, but a few others are doing quite well, too. Take a look:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Birthday Cards	41,242,773	+6,009,722	+14.57
2.	Calendario de Amigos	4,586,492	+3,081,641	+67.19
3.	Static FBML	12,895,673	+1,906,921	+14.79
4.	FarmVille	75,476,475	+1,120,699	+1.48
5.	Facebook for iPhone	26,053,163	+924,310	+3.55
6.	Happy Island	10,612,387	+892,445	+8.41
7.	Tiki Farm	6,333,103	+801,700	+12.66
8.	FishVille	25,221,818	+705,243	+2.80
9.	Mafia Wars	24,398,295	+591,077	+2.42
10.	Gangster City	706,173	+568,997	+80.57
11.	Yearbook	4,786,332	+563,976	+11.78
12.	Little Warrior	1,057,079	+530,889	+50.22
13.	Wild Ones	2,197,693	+523,510	+23.82
14.	MindJolt Games	16,109,140	+472,473	+2.93
15.	Texas HoldEm Poker	25,066,873	+464,276	+1.85
16.	Graffiti	5,910,433	+460,251	+7.79
17.	Facebook for BlackBerry® smartphones	13,517,451	+423,138	+3.13
18.	Music	11,831,851	+417,122	+3.53
19.	My Town	1,551,376	+390,730	+25.19
20.	Country Life	8,017,883	+379,550	+4.7

Skipping Calendario de Amigos, which is successful for some of the same reasons as Birthday Cards, take a look at Static FBML. This is the second week in a row that it has come in at number three, although this week it added another 500,000 users over its previous gain. The growth is a bit curious, since the app, used to create customized boxes within profile pages, requires some ability with HMTL or Facebook’s own markup language — in fact some, big app developers use it, we hear.

There probably aren’t really 12 million plus HTML experts on Facebook — one hint is that Static FBML’s daily active user base is much smaller, at just over 700,000 people. Also, there seems to be a high proportion of Turkish-language users on the app. It’s possible there’s a trend among that user-group of installing Static FBML to make minor adjustments on their profiles.

Farmville is next, but we cover its ilk over at Inside Social Games. We’ll wrap up with number five: Facebook for iPhone. This app and Facebook for BlackBerry® smartphones mysteriously vanished last week when their new user growth dipped in unison; see below. In general, mobile apps should be growing for some time as ever more people pick up smartphones.

With the social gaming industry trucking along with new games and creative uses of virtual goods, more buzz has been stemming from Apple’s launch of the iPad this sweek. Here are the headlines from Inside Social Games.

Monday, January 25th, 2010

• Familiar Names and Few New Entries on This Week’s List of Top Games By Growth in Monthly Users
• Frosmo’s Arcade Tournaments Come to Facebook
• IFB: As Facebook Gears Up for Credits, Here’s the Exchange Rates for the 15 Supported Currencies
• Live Gamer Cuts Deal with Sony, Launching Upgraded Virtual Monetization Services

Tuesday, January 26th, 2010

• Namco Arcade Joins Facebook to Promote Mobile Games
• Inside Virtual Goods: The Future of Social Gaming 2010, Is Here
• Conquering Europe – and Sports Games on Facebook? – with Galacticos Football
• New Russian Social Game Developer Drimmi Raises Venture Funding
• Reaching Zen with Temple of Mahjong 2

Wednesday, January 27th, 2010

• Small Games Make It Big on This Week’s List of Top Gainers by New Daily Users
• Tiger Woods PGA Tour Online Adds Facebook Connect
• What Will Apple’s New iPad Mean for Third-Party Developers?
• Football Virtual Goods Come to FarmVille in Time for the Super Bowl

Thursday, January 28th, 2010

• Bee2gether: A Facebook Popularity Contest Game
• Announcing Inside Social Apps 2010 – Coming April 20th in San Francisco
• App Developers Talk About Apple’s New iPad
• A Look at the Social Gaming Ecosystem on China’s RenRen.com

Friday, January 29th, 2010

• Gangsters, Warriors and Card Games Reach This Week’s List of Top Emerging Games on Facebook
• Four Simple Social iPhone Games: the Fun, the Overpriced and the Inane
• Social Gaming Roundup: ScamVille, Xbox, Virtual Goods, and More

Facebook Breaks Ground in Oregon With a Bang – The Facebook crew broke ground at the location for their new data center in Prineville, Oregon last Thursday with the traditional hard hats and shovels accessorized with Facebook logos. Then, the real fun came, as you can see in this video, when the 6,000 pounds of explosives were used to move some real dirt.

Microsoft Releases Silverlight 4 Beta Client for Facebook this Week — For Windows and OSX; Imran Hussain did a good job of working through all of the available feature, which include friends, profiles, photos, event, messaging, video, etc.

Thursday, Data Privacy Day – A Facebook blog commemorated Data Privacy Day Thursday by asking an array of professionals, governmental officials, academics and other to share their perspective on the meaning of privacy. One notable quote came from Alex Türk, Chairman of the French Data Protection Commission, who said, “Because European citizens have experienced dark times when the exercise of our fundamental freedoms was seriously endangered, privacy has become one of our dearest possessions.”

Canadian Officials Investigate Facebook’s Privacy Policies – Despite a July 2009 investigation examining the privacy issues raised by Facebook, the Canadian Privacy Commissioner is again looking into how Facebook’s new privacy policies handle user information. The investigation follows on the heels of complaints from Canadian users about the privacy policy introduced in December, Elizabeth Denham, an assistant to the Privacy Commissioner, said of the complaint, “The individual’s complaint mirrors some of the concerns that our Office has heard and expressed to Facebook in recent months.” After last year’s investigation Facebook agreed to modify its site to address the Canadian government’s concerns, specifically better explaining how personal information is handled and giving users increased control over their personal information.

Shoppers Visit Facebook Last – A Softpedia study from last quarter indicated that 86% of U.S. online retailers now have a Facebook page, with that number expected to reach 99% soon, despite the fact that consumers have been slow to adopt social media as a shopping destination. The study ranked social networking sites as the least used online shopping resource, with 60% of social media users stating they don’t use sites like Facebook to shop. However, this is changing as people share more about their shopping behavior on the site, and as companies figure out how to advertise on it; Offers exclusive to Facebook fans and Facebook stores are some of the efforts underway.

Clorox Hires Full-Time Social Media Attorney – Clorox, maker of a popular brand of bleach, has begun advertising a position of full-time in-house legal counsel focusing on social media — a new expectation for corporate counsel, according to AdAge. The primary duties of the social media counsel are to “clear and procure intellectual property rights regarding production and distribution of advertising, including Screen Actors Guild and American Federation of Television and Recording Artists issues, consumer privacy and video licensing.”

Most Facebook Design Employees Underwhelmed By iPad – On a fun post Friday, Facebook’s design team posted an informal poll about its members’ attitudes on Apple’s new iPad. All told, about 29% were really impressed, 5% were not impressed, another 5% were not impressed but still willing to purchase and 62% said they wanted to “play around with it first” before making a judgment.

Facebook to Open Spanish Office – Business people and tech entrepreneurs were excited across Spain this week on the heels of the announcement that Facebook is set to open a sales office in Madrid. Currently Spain has 8 million Facebook users and the social network’s primary competition is Tuenti Facebook already has European offices in the UK, Paris and Dublin.

Classmates.com Fighting Losses to Facebook – One of the original social networking sites from the 1990s, Seattle-based Classmates.com, is upping the ante through promotions and advertising to compete with Facebook, which scooped up 112 million unique visitors last year as Classmates.com fell to 12 million in December. An increase in paid accounts was attributed to price promotions, brining revenue for last quarter to $58.7 million.

DST’s Milner Chats With TechChrunch – Yuri Milner, CEO of the Russian Digital Sky Technologies that recently invested millions in Facebook and Zynga, sat down with TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington for an interview during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. In both cases DST bought preferred stock form the companies and common stock from employees, resulting in the moniker “DST-style deals” for this type of business deal.

JetBlue, the economy airline, launched their All-You-Can-Jet Fan Sweepstakes Facebook promotion last month in an effort to drive up the number of their fans to compete with the million-plus followers the company has on Twitter.

The sweepstakes started on December 9, 2009 and ends on  January 31. Before the promotion the company had 60,000 fans, now the company is bordering on 125,000.

Alison Croyle, spokeswoman for JetBlue, said the timing of the holiday promotion was directed at picking up where a previous Facebook promotion left off in September.

“The All-You-Can-Jet Sweepstakes was a huge success during September — our lower travel period for our customer. Based on the success of that, it was another way to leverage interest in our social media,” Croyle tells us.

The company has more than one million fans on Twitter and wanted to duplicate that success on Facebook with the sweepstakes.

Prizes in the sweepstakes ranged from a free round-trip flight awarded weekly (for a total of eight) to a team prize drawing of a five-day/four-night getaway to a grand prize drawing for one All-You-Can-Jet pass valid for one year of travel.

Facebook users have to fan the site in order to enter, then register by entering their personal information, and then may receive multiple ballots for multiple chances to win, or compete with their team members on JetBlue’s Facebook page.

JetBlue also had a caveat in the contest, that for every 250,000 fans the page added, an extra All-You-Can-Jet pass would be added to the mix for another fan to win. It was an ambitious goal, Croyle says, but in the end JetBlue was happy with all the fans that joined them on Facebook during the promotion.

JetBlue’s Facebook page is also a hub for deals on airfare, with status updates and a Wall littered with deals for the company’s major hubs in New York-JFK, Washington D.C.-Dulles, Ft. Lauderdale, Long Beach, Oakland, among other places.

While advertising offers companies from TrialPay to Offerpal and Super Rewards have been carving out the market in North America, Deal United has — like regional rivals including SponsorPay and SupersonicAds, tried to provide more relevant ads to online software vendors, gaming sites and other services. By working with advertisers and publishers in specific European markets, it is able to provide incentivized offers to users who might not otherwise be exposed to them.

Since its founding in December of 2007, Deal United has been able to sign up a list of known brands to provide offers in German (Otto, Bon Prix, Fonic, TV Spielfilm), French (Emusic, Toner Services, Metaboli, Foto.com, Dress-for-less.fr) and English (Toys R Us, Skype, Vistaprint). The company also covers Austria, Italy, Spain and Switzerland.

The Munich company is trying to clearly show users why they should take offers beyond just getting the reward, chief sales officer Jürgen Weichert, tells me, especially because European users may not have seen this type of advertising before. It tries to make the process clear; for example, the screenshot above lists the value of what the user gets when they complete the offer. When users go through Deal United’s offer flow, they get get an email confirming what they’re earning, including a link to see when the currency they’ve earned becomes available.

Deal United gets its inventory through direct deals with advertisers as well as from affiliate networks. Its focus is real-world goods, discounts from major brands, and other high-quality offers. It makes money from advertisers when users place orders rather than from impressions or clicks.

The company works with a wide range of publisher types — social games are just a portion, Weichert says, without elaborating on the size of that business — so it views its main competitors to be TrialPay and European rival SponsorPay. Another regional rival, SupersonicAds, has had somewhat of a different focus, like video ads. In the US, TrialPay’s business has centered on providing offers in exchange for software downloads, for example, and it has not been as focused on social games as companies like Offerpal and Super Rewards.

Of course, all of these companies are coming into contact more often these days, as the advertising offers business becomes a more prevalent means of monetizing users across different types of sites, and as social gaming expands the market size. Many US offers companies have opened up operations in Europe.

Still, Deal United’s specific focus on high-value offers appears to be well-timed. While much of the industry has run low-quality, and sometimes scammy offers in the past — mobile ringtone subscriptions are the usual example — increased scrutiny and legal action has prompted most companies to focus on improving offer quality. Because the company has been focused here already, it may have a jump on relationships with advertisers and publishers (again, we don’t have a good view of the company’s revenues or the overall European offers market size).

Going forward, Deal United is looking to expand its business on Facebook in Europe not just by getting new regional clients, but by  increasing relationships with developers anywhere in the world who have large European audiences, as well as the advertisers who want to reach those people.

Facebook has just announced a new push to get people reading news on the site — a detailed blog post, including the suggestion that users create “News” lists on their homepages, showing the latest news items from the publication Pages that users are fans of.

This isn’t a new feature, just a good suggestion for how to use lists to track information you care about. From the post:

You can even create a “News” list to filter news-oriented Pages into one view on your News Feed. Simply add relevant Pages to the list, just as you would with a friends list. The next time you sign on to Facebook, you can click the “News” filter to see stories from all of the news outlets of which you’ve become a fan.

This is another way that Facebook is trying to make itself a more central part of people’s lives. The list is acting as a sort of aggregated social RSS feed reader, but it makes the process simpler for users who don’t understand RSS — just fan a page and check this list from time to time.

The move will probably get more publications updating their Pages, too, thereby making the service even more valuable to users.

Here’s a puzzle for you: How can Zynga be behind three of this week’s top emerging Facebook apps still under a million users, when none of Zynga’s apps are on the list? The description for Cafe World Cash says it all: “Please note that this application is not connected to Cafe World by Zynga.” Sure, and Cafe World’s resounding success has nothing to do with the users streaming into an app with the same name, either.

The other two apps of this type you’ll notice on our AppData list, below, are FarmVille Gifts Collectibles and Friends of FarmVille . Take a look:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Horoscope Today	508,454	+499,410	+98.22
2.	Gangster City	459,799	+454,127	+98.77
3.	Cafe World Cash – Just For Fun	396,269	+328,889	+83.00
4.	Little Warrior	687,761	+291,986	+42.45
5.	開心寶貝	991,633	+282,715	+28.51
6.	Akinator	782,906	+252,163	+32.21
7.	你問我答	735,080	+208,430	+28.35
8.	The Pink Ribbon	513,924	+202,981	+39.50
9.	Band of Heroes	935,362	+192,854	+20.62
10.	Nestle Crunch Challenge	248,990	+183,983	+73.89
11.	FarmVille Gifts Collectibles	177,693	+177,019	+99.62
12.	Be Naughty!	856,079	+166,913	+19.50
13.	Sanalika	354,210	+139,642	+39.42
14.	Show Some Love!	647,995	+138,298	+21.34
15.	Ploteczki	152,096	+133,955	+88.07
16.	What’s your Actual Age?	803,387	+118,983	+14.81
17.	Little Rock Pool	506,827	+108,671	+21.44
18.	Rummy Royal	199,376	+96,652	+48.48
19.	Frosmo	350,365	+90,242	+25.76
20.	Friends of FarmVille	197,184	+87,926	+44.59

There’s a further interesting similarity between the three aforementioned apps, beyond their supposed lack of connection to eponymous Zynga games. They all have a focus on virtual goods and helping players connect, things that players can in fact accomplish in the games themselves. Could it be that Zynga fans are yearning for more features?

We’ll keep an eye on these sorts of apps as they grow, assuming Facebook doesn’t choose to squash them all first. In the meantime, there are other, more legitimate apps to talk about. Horoscope Today is the top entry, having gained almost all its half million users in a week’s time.

Horoscope’s developer is unlisted, but there appears to be some connection to a new game called Jungle Extreme, judging from Horoscope’s relentless flogging (as seen below). But, oddly enough, Jungle Extreme won’t load. There doesn’t appear to be any user data on it, either.

There are several games in the top ten, the most interesting being  Gangster City, a new entry from Playfish — head over to InsideSocialGames for more on that.

There’s also a good showing from quiz-style apps: Akinator, 你問我答 and What’s your Actual Age? fall within this general category. Finally, The Pink Ribbon has appeared again. It’s a breast cancer charity app that looks more than a little fishy. We’re following up and should have more to report soon.

Chicagoland Toyota Dealers are giving local fans of their Facebook page a chance to win a new Toyota Prius at the upcoming Chicago Auto Show. Anyone hoping to have a shot at the free car can enter through the Prius Giveaway tab on the Chicagoland Toyota Dealers fan page.

The contest, of course, is also a way for the dealers to connect with local users — potential car purchasers — on Facebook.

The giveaway is being run through an application built into the newly-launched page, and entrants must become fans of the Chicagoland Toyota Dealers page to become eligible to win. The rules state that the winner must be a resident of certain counties in Illinois and Indiana so the field of potential winners is fairly limited.

The app is fairly straightforward, with entrants only needing to enter some personal information as well as whether or not they intend to buy a car within the next 6 months. Inviting friends to take part in the contest increases an entrants’ chance to win, as well as giving the dealers more leads on potential customers.The contest will probably also benefit from the popularity of the Prius on Facebook; the fan page for the car currently has close to 49,000 fans, as well as some popular interactive elements.

Since the winner must be local to the 30 dealers that make up the group, the contest could end up generating some valuable information on residents of the area that are looking to purchase a car in the near future. Getting leads is always a priority for auto dealerships, and this application appears to be a powerful tool to target a very specialized demographic and collect information that could translate into future sales.

The Chicagoland Dealers will be drawing the names of 10 semi-finalists one at a time building up to the Chicago Auto Show. Those semi-finalists will be invited to the 102nd Chicago Auto Show and given an envelope; the winner’s envelope will contain a picture of the car.