Archive for Trends
May 24, 2008 at 9:49 pm
· Filed under Analytics, Events, Recent Updates, Social Metrics, Trends
We had a great time at InterPlay last Thursday! Special Thanks to Bret Terrill for inviting us 
Check out the first 25 minutes of our keynote here.
Brief Summary:
- Social Gaming is HOT: Compared to Messaging apps (3x page view multiple) and Dating apps (20x multiple), social gaming apps are seeing, on average, a 50x multiple compared to other categories.
- Relative Metric Comparisons Matter: It’s not just about “Daily Active Users” (unique visitors / day). It’s not just about “Page Views” or “Avg Page Views per Daily Active User.” Different gaming apps do better depending on which metric you are looking at. It’s about looking at all these numbers in relation to the rest to see the bigger picture. At dA, we are all about understanding and analyzing the global data set.
- Increased gaming complexity: All apps follow an app life cycle – the rise, the plateau, the fall. The rates of growth and decline vary immensely depending on the nature of the application. At dA, we are seeing more complex, deeper game mechanics develop and evolve over time on the Facebook Platform, all of which are leading to higher engagement.
- Shift in traditional gaming audience: Social games are targeting a much broader audience than ever before. Yes, there is a 37-year-old woman in Ohio who is petting her virtual pet for 3 hours each day.
- Time to focus on Gen 3.0 Games: We talked about Gen 1.0. We’re seeing the rising players in Gen 2.0. Now, it’s time to focus on today and what will be coming in the future.
What’s Next
- We’ll be speaking on June 5th at the Social Media Business School event in LA. Don’t worry – we never give the same talk twice. New insights everytime.
- We’ll be relocating to San Francisco!
- Yes, per the Q&A discussion at Interplay, we are working on something big and an extension of dA to be released in the upcoming months. Stay tuned for the details
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May 19, 2008 at 12:25 am
· Filed under Events, Facebook, Recent Updates, Trends, social gaming ·Tagged social gaming
Hey folks, we’re still alive, we promise ;p We’ve been working hard and seeing some very interesting trends emerging…
Just a heads up for everyone in the bay area this week: we’ll be at InterPlay: The Business of Games on the Social Web this Thursday, May 22nd in San Francisco. We will be revealing some of our newest discoveries on the platform and social gaming vertical, so hope to see you all there!
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February 26, 2008 at 6:46 am
· Filed under Analytics, Facebook, Trends ·Tagged dating, Facebook, games, Trends, wall apps
As promised earlier, we’ll be taking a closer look at the Facebook app economy on a category-level, looking at trends between different categories or “types” of applications.
To start, we’ve chosen to display advanced stats for 3 categories: wall apps (the most popular), dating (the most ‘crowded’), and games (highest engagement based on % daily active).
Wall Apps
The data shows that Wall apps are split fairly evenly between males and females. Please note, however, that we did include Honesty Box in this category as well.
Dating Apps
It’s not surprising to see that the highest affinity category to Dating is Cars, given that Dating is slightly more “male.”
Games Apps
Games have a more “male” audience (not too surprising). Note, the actual percentage may actually be much higher, given that our games categories only has 3 apps, and Scrabulous is one of them (e.g. word games tend to have a larger female audience). For more analysis on game apps, take a look at Bret Terrill’s post. Bret has taken our “advanced stats” and performed his own analysis on the top 3 game developers on the Facebook platform. This is precisely the kind of insight and analysis that dA wants to provide to developers and the larger community. We definitely love to see more people look at our data and draw their own conclusions.
Notes and Considerations
- Data is dependent on our categorization procedure — specifically, which apps we’ve included in each of the categories. That being said, we only have chosen to look at the top apps on our Leaderboards in order to ensure that our data is statistically significant.
- Data is a “snapshot” overview of the economy and time-sensitive since our Leaderboards change over time.
- Data is biased towards users who have installed the app and may not necessarily reflect true “daily active.”
- Data is currently heavily based on US users, so data will be skewed for apps with a heavy non-US userbase.
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February 25, 2008 at 4:33 am
· Filed under Analytics, Facebook, Trends ·Tagged Analytics, causes, dating, Facebook, social gaming, social networks, Trends
At dA, we’ve been working closely and analyzing the rich dataset from the Facebook application economy. In future blog posts, we hope to share some of this information with the larger community as we feel it can help developers and investors, whether it is to make more sense out of all this data or identify potential (or overlooked) opportunities.
Last week, we released our Advanced Stats feature to identify interesting trends (app overlap and app affinity) for a specific application. Now, we’re moving to the category level, looking at patterns between similar “types” of applications — be it dating, games, or movies.
Most Popular Types of Applications on Facebook
There’s a snapshot view of the overall Facebook app economy ranked by most popular “category” (or type of app installed):
Methodology
We grouped the top apps from our Leaderboard into 13 custom categories (the 12 shown above and “Mobile”). We did not use the categories provided straight from Facebook as we know these are provided by the developer and have inherent biases. This is one of the reasons why dA feels strongly for having a third-party provide analytics to social networking applications.
The Big Trends
- Facebook is a “communication platform.” The top 3 app categories are essentially all variations of lightweight messaging. At its a core, a poke, a gift, or a wall post are all direct one-to-one interaction between two people. Also note that these are all extensions of the original features of Facebook. (Related link: “3 ways that social networks are different from other forms of online communication“)
- Facebook is about friends. Friend group apps, such as like Top Friends, Entourage, and Circle of Friends, are inherently viral apps by nature. It’s also something we are all used to (like how instant messenger buddy lists work). It was only later that Facebook introduced the concept of “Friend Lists.”
- Facebook is about having FUN. The majority of users are not joining to be “serious.” Entertainment (music, movies, and games) is their top priority with music (by iLike) and movies (by Flixster) as the two dominating categories. This trend very much echoes the real world as well. It’s interesting that these two categories are pretty much “owned” by only 1 player (as opposed to games with multiple developers). Does this mean there’s no more room for another highly successful movies or music app?
- Dating is becoming the hottest (and crowded) market. It’s not a surprise that a good number of the developers we’ve interviwed had either developed, are developing, or thought about developing a “dating” app at some point. While only 9% of Facebook users have installed 1 dating app, there are already 12 top apps inside this category. This shows that multiple apps can be successful in any given category. However, whether or not this is sustainable over the long-term is a different story.
- Games and “cause” apps are also hot. As noted by Lightspeed Venture Partners’ Jeremy Liew, social gaming is quickly becoming a very attractive market on Facebook. These casual gaming apps, ranging from Scrabulous to Texas Holdem Poker, have very high engagement compared to other apps. “Cause” type apps are also very popular, though this category may be overlooked compared to most. Interestingly enough, this was one of the reasons (Lil) Green Patch got started.
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