Consistent Growing Facebook Apps

Growth rate gives an interesting perspective on Facebook apps - different than just most users or (ahem...) Recently Popular. Looking at about 2,000 apps which are in the top 1,000 most users or top 1,000 (ahem...) Recently Popular, there were 28 which had a daily average growth rate of 5% or better in the most recent week and 2% or better in the 3 prior periods - back to July 6. Here they are:

Of course, we excluded any app which couldn't get a calculated growth rate for any single period - so (disclaimer) we apologize if we might have missed a specific app due to our lameness in collecting the data for that app for one of the periods reported here...
If you want your own copy of this spreadsheet, you can get it on this link (you'll need to sign in to a google account - or register for one - which, no, does not require you to have a GMail account....)

A month of Apps - Top 101 in User Growth

Here's a list of the top 101 Apps in terms of user growth for the past month - from June 21 through July 22. Only includes Apps which had users at the start of the period and have at least 1000 users at the end of the period.


(get the full screen view here)

So, this list is a bit flawed, perhaps... as apps like Carbon Diet Plan
, Army Vs. Navy , Local Chat , and a few others, snuck in there with just enough users to make the cut...

Who lost the most users July 11-17: the bottom 21

As shameful as it may seem... even good apps see a period of profile and home page cleansing following that period of explosive growth.... and, sometimes, there never was any explosive growth... just pure rejection. These apps, in the table below, had the most negative growth rates in the most recent period (July 11-17)...which shouldn't imply anything about prior periods - but, as you'll see, it does, as only 3 of the 21 had any positive growth in prior periods.


Some of them are actually born from good non-FB apps (you be the judge of that), so maybe they're just not following the rules of good Facebook app marketing design as told by Dave McClure.... or, better yet, Facebook news feed optimization, as told by Justin Smith and Jonathan Lipps. Or, maybe they just suck and people had to add them to find that out.
It's the WWW (Wild Wild West) all over again... at first, everything draws traffic... then, value prevails and we're not all just surfin', lookin' fer the next best thing.