Facebook May Be Over 100 Million, But Many Apps Show 0

August 26th, 2008 by Nick Gonzalez

Facebook informally announced a new milestone of over 100 million active users; yet another sign the site is one of the most vibrant social ecosystems again.

However, while crawling around the site, I noticed a lot of apps coming up 0 monthly active users when I know they have thousands (see pic). While I’m sure this is just a delay in reporting, as happens while processing billions of data fields, it throws a monkey wrench into the day to day analysis I like to do on the network and that developers rely on to compare themselves with the competition.

Which brings me to another problem I think monthly active users has, aside from being delayed right now. Monthly Actives, while in sync with standard advertising practices, encourages MAU pumping that was harder with DAUs and Facebook’s crackdown on spam. MAUs mean you only need to get a user to the application once during the month to show activity. This means developers can pump and dump their apps by advertising heavily and then doing business based on that number. Some websites have used this scheme to boost numbers prior to acquisitions or other business deals.

While proper due diligence can avoid the problem, DAUs also showed an apps stickiness better than MAU, giving developers better insights into what’s up on the platform. Facebook, please bring back the DAU.

Tags: developers

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 26th, 2008 at 3:34 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.