Inside Social Games

We’re now publishing leaderboards of the Facebook applications with the most daily active users over on AppData. As we have been doing posts looking at which apps have gained the most monthly active users each week, we’re going to start doing posts looking at which apps have gained the most daily active users over the course of each week.

In case you’re wondering why both measures, monthly actives shows the overall arc of an app while daily actives shows how engaging it is; engagement, as most developers already know, ties directly in to how much revenue you can make per user. We’ve also added another new metric to AppData: the number of daily actives divided by monthly actives, or the “sticky factor.” This shows you how well the app is maintaining if not growing its user base, if not its bottom line. If you want a more detailed explanation, check out this post over on Inside Facebook.

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	FishVille	11,465,767	+10,102,806	+88.11
2.	Bowling Buddies	1,773,849	+1,773,849	+100.00
3.	Happy Aquarium	27,519,717	+1,712,351	+6.22
4.	Happy Pets	1,554,100	+1,543,619	+99.33
5.	Restaurant Life (BETA)	1,518,909	+1,518,909	+100.00
6.	FarmVille	65,387,640	+1,486,758	+2.27
7.	Diva Life	1,964,050	+1,153,914	+58.75
8.	Island Paradise	6,280,187	+691,148	+11.01
9.	Yakuza Lords	1,435,807	+651,758	+45.39
10.	Little Warrior	2,293,675	+441,141	+19.23
12.	Fish Life	1,760,336	+424,778	+24.13
13.	Band of Heroes	582,893	+416,575	+71.47
14.	Café World	28,707,412	+350,715	+1.22
15.	Texas HoldEm Poker	19,281,787	+330,746	+1.72
16.	Know-It-All Trivia	1,692,186	+302,250	+17.86
17.	Mobsters 2: Vendetta	4,873,850	+283,514	+5.82
18.	Castle Age	2,250,316	+261,748	+11.63
19.	Roller Coaster Kingdom	15,488,095	+191,336	+1.24
20.	Pet Society	21,827,377	+181,668	+0.83

As you can see, most of the leading apps are games. Some of the top gainers are, unsurprisingly, games that have just launched — FishVille and Happy Pets have only been out for a week or two. Still, in both cases, you can see the games sticky factors dropping as they grow larger. FishVille currently has a sticky factor of 45% while Happy Pets has a sticky factor of 53%. In other words, the more time passes, relatively fewer people are playing the game every day.

It is very hard to keep engagement up on a game (as it is with anything else), which is why it’s especially impressive to see the daily actives so high for games with tens of millions of users. FarmVille has an amazing 26.7 million daily active users, or 41 percent of its total user base — it is by far the most engaging app on Facebook, that we know of. And it’s still growing, with an increase of 1.82 million daily actives in the past week.

Same goes for Café World, which is seeing its monthly actives rate level off, relatively speaking, while its daily actives (and so, its sticky factor) have taken a recent upswing, climbing to 34% since the beginning of the month. This suggests Zynga may have recently introduced another engagement-driving feature or two, or pumped in more ads, or did some new cross-promotion.

Happy Aquarium also continues to surge, although its daily actives appear to be tracking its monthly actives at a pretty consistent 28% since last month.