Facebook Stats Commentary: comparing app rankings in small doses

Doing a bit of analysis on the numbers, I noticed some interesting movements…

For the top 101 apps as ranked by pure number of users – comparing 6/25 to 6/28 (that’s 3 days difference):
- 20 apps moved up in rank (Zombies moved from position 72 to 37!)
- 16 apps stayed in their same position
- 57 apps moved down in rank
- 8 apps got pushed off the list (which means 8 new apps showed up)

65% of apps moved down or off the list and only 20% moved up… That’s a pretty clear signal… or is it? Actually, out of the top 101 Apps, only 8 new entrants displaced 8 apps from the prior period - but this might be considered significant, given that this comparison is really just a 3 day difference. I think this motion of the top ranked apps is a combination of 2 factors, both related to the newness of the platform:
First, some applications with the most users still might not deserve to be there (but some do - like iLike), but they are, due only to lack of anything else for Facebook users to look at.
Second, many new apps grow fast, but quickly reach their viral ceiling – being tried and sometimes adopted by the niche audience to which it might directly apply, but then having nowhere else to grow (that’s my definition of the “Viral Ceiling”, being coined here for the very first time as far as I know without searching Google and likely disproving that claim ;).

Now, let’s do the same analysis on Growth Rate Ranking…

For the top 101 apps as ranked by their growth rate – comparing the period of 6/21-6/25 to the period of 6/21-28 (yes – just 3 days added to the periods of comparison):
- 7 apps moved up in rank
- 5 apps stayed in their same position
- 76 apps moved down in rank
- 13 apps got pushed off the list.

89% of applications moved down/off the list and only 7% moved up! The range of Daily Growth Rates shifted up – leaving some pretty healthy growing apps (at say, 7% daily growth!) to fall off the list… The ranges were:
- 7% to 2675% from June 21-25
- 11% to 4955% from June 21-28 (you had to grow 11% per DAY to be top 101!)

With all this apparent downward shifting – do you think the top ranked Applications have suffered? No. On the Growth ranking, 9 out of the top 10 ranked Apps were still in the top 10 this week. On the Most Users ranking, all 10 stayed in the top 10 – with only minor shifts among them.
For now, this looks a bit like early web patterns, where any content was hit hard (sort of)… just throw something fun at this crowd, and they’ll try it. If they like it just a little bit, they’ll pass it on to their friends, passively, just in the act of trying it ("JR just added the Magic 8 Ball Application" - which, by the way, was ranked 94th in growth and then fell off the top 101 growth ranking, but actually moved UP from 29th to 28th in number of users - with 445k as of 6/28!)

Facebook Stats: Fastest Growing Apps last week

Some updated stats on Facebook Apps - this time with a comparison of where these apps fell on this ranking the last time we did it versus this time... Not a perfectly consistent process yet - as the last time was a shorter period and ended in the middle of last week... while the stats for this week are pretty much a full week (or a bit more... June 21-28). Also notice that most of the top apps according to the Facebook's raw number of total users have dropped off this growth rate ranking just due to the challenge of adding upwards of 50,000 or more users per week to achieve a growth rate at the levels shown in this top 101.



I'm guessing we'll continue to see Sticky Notes grow, as it's one of those standard useful thingy's... and, well, sticky ;)
There's some real consistent growth in a few unique-ish entries, like Zombies, PersonalDNA and Beeeeeeeer... and you'll see some fast growing up-n-comers like Greek Pride and Fried Wheel...

Who won the most Facebook users last week?

This week it seemed only fair to show why some of the top apps, which have several million Facebook users, have what appears to be (in this bizarro-world of Facebook growth) a modest growth rate of "only" 5-10% per week...
We've sorted by the raw number of users added week-to-week... This gives a beter sense of how strong some of the top apps are still growing. In other words, to grow 5% when you've got 1 million users(+50,000 users!) is harder than to grow 5% when you're still in the discovery phase with only, say, 10,000 users (+500 users)...



That said, this view also highlights those Apps which add tremendous numbers of users despite their small size... What is "Zombies" , anyway ?

Facebook Stats: Fastest Growing Apps

The prior post was really just the top apps, as rated by the number of users and then sorted by growth rate... This sheet will show the 101 fastest growing facebook apps which have at least 1000 users - all as of June 25th. The growth rate for this sheet used something slightly more current to remove some noise - it measures growth for a slightly shorter, more recent period of June 21 through June 25.


There's still some noise here, as you can see... "I Can Has Cheezburger" is on the list, and then of course, near the top of the list is "Beeeeeeeer" ;)
Also - notice that only 6 apps in the top 101 fastest growing has over 100,000 users - so it's the long tail of apps which seem to have these spiking growth rates... When we get the "Momentum Ranking" going, that should help give a true picture of the apps to watch.

Facebook Stats: Top Apps by Growth Rate

Let's start here... Facebook has become the new favorite target for developers of gadgety stuff, and a clear path to acquire thousands of users through both real value as well as simple experiments... You see everyone from the highly successful entrenched sites - like Digg, Twitter and Last.fm to the totally experimental and alleged fun - like Food Fight! and Simpson's Quotes.

I started capturing data on Facebook user counts on 19th June, so below are the 101 Facebook apps with the most users (as of June 25) , sorted by Growth Rate for the period of June 19th through June 25th.

Notice some hot apps appear on the bottom of the list with the Growth Rate not calculated, as they didn't even appear on the list on June 19th... but that means they've grown to their current levels fast... so don't overlook these.



There are plenty of apps which had huge growth rates for this period but didn't have at least 18,680 users to make the top 101 most used... but I'll likely highlight a few in future posts, as they really are the ones to watch if you watch often enough...