Growth Rates of the apps with the most users

Here are the top 25 apps in terms of number of users (as of Aug 7) and their growth rate trend over the past month... just a contrast to the growth rate trends of the prior post - which used no criteria for number of users, but used a stringent criteria on growth rates.

Apologies to Ivko - author of Compare People - as I missed the stats on that super-fast growing app on 7/31...
If you want the spreadsheet, use this link - it will give you your own copy in your Google account - the data from this post is in the 2nd sheet - the data from the prior post is in the first sheet.

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....)

Top Growth Apps from July 22 - 31 (finally)

I still haven't really put enough time in to make the data perfect (fixing name issues and missing links...) but figured I better get this into your hands before it rots...

Only 17 of the top 100 had any users a month ago...
More commentary coming soon...

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...

Growth Trends reveal true growth

I realize every time we rank apps on the basis of pure growth rate between two dates we open the door for lots of questions:

- What about NEW apps which didn't have users at the start of the period (we leave those out, but every so often we have one which makes us re-think that - this latest period it was Likeness by the successful FB developer Peter Louis, which entered the scene with over 800,000 users!). Peter co-authored SuperWall.

- How can you compare the growth rate of an app with 100,000 users with an app with only 1,000 users? (It's easier than trying to put them in groups... but we may start doing that).

- Isn't it more important to see the TREND of growth across multiple periods rather than just ranking based on 1 period? (YES! .. hence, this post..)


So we decided to tackle that last question just a bit here... We looked at the trend of growth across 3 periods: June 28 through July 6, July 6 through July 11, July 11 through July 17. Three growth rates tell us much more than only one.

Overall, most apps growth rates decline after the first burst. And, in fact, we've seen about 200 out of 1000 which just disappear after their first showing on our list... mainly due to not growing fast enough to stay in the top 800 or so most used apps. Consistently increasing growth rates are very rare indeed... only 24 apps in our list of just over a thousand achieved this, and that includes 3 which started with a negative growth rate, one of which is still negative (Lamefactor) - just less negative than when it started ;) [BTW, 167 apps were noted as "turn-arounds, which saw a decrease in growth rate from the first period to the second and subsequently increased in growth rate again in the third growth period...]

There are two notable exceptions, which you can see clearly in the chart above which shows all 24 of those with a positive trend:

PuzzleBee , by TheBroth: Started with 3,158 users on June 28th... then had a consistently increasing daily growth rate - 10.55%, 15.94%, 92.04% - to end on July 17th with 68,259 users. An average growth rate of 39.51% ! Take note... and give Nick O'Neil some credit for spotting the value in this app back on June 22, when he blogged about it.

Google Reader Shared Items, by Mario Romero, was growing at a respectable 1%+ per day and then Robert Scoble wrote about it as a Digg killer, others picked up the story and wham - the daily growth rate of this app jumped to over 41% ! Let's see if that trend continues since at the end of the period we're discussing (July 17th eod), it still had only 4,064 users.

There are a few others with a continuing positive trend, but most of them are still light on users in total - and the 24 in the chart only included those with over 1000 users as of July 17th.

Facebook Top 21 Growing Apps - July 6-11

New data for the 5 day period of July 6th through July 11 in this post - Top 21 Facebook apps ranked by growth rate - including only those which had more than 1,000 users at the end of the period.



Some Highlights:

My Aquarium - from the same Greg Thomson who brought you the original concept with My Garden - had the highest growth rate by far. This cute app grew a whopping 4,852% each day during the period... that's 23,629 users per day on average! And it started the period with only 487 users! (excitement intentional)

Pacman, by thewurld.com, grew an average of 316% per day, ending the period with more than 30,000 users. Old concept, new platform (sounds familiar...).

Love Matcher (Thomas Fletcher) and Fantasy Football (David Fitzgibbon) took the next 2 spots, each growing to the modest but respectable levels of 5,000+ users.

Vampires, by the same trio who brought us the highly productive Zombies app - Blake Commagere, AJ Olson and Rob Gungor) spiked to 240,000+ users to take the 5th spot - growing at 243% per day.

Also worth mentioning...
Bush Countdown Clock, by the Nick O'Neil (who has been blogging about Facebook now very consistently) comes in at #10 with a respectable 108% daily growth.

Facebook Stats: Top 21 Momentum Growth

Let's try something new this week... We came up with a new measure which combines growth rate and number of users... so it tries to punish those huge apps (many many users) which have very slow growth rates and reward those smaller apps which have huge growth rates. For now, here are the top 21 using our new "Momentum" rating...

Facebook Applications - Ranked by "Momentum":

We've highlighted in green those apps which are new within the past 2 weeks... That means we couldn't numerically calculate their growth rate in the prior week period.

Some highlights:

My Garden came out of nowhere to take the top momentum rank - by quite a margin - moving from 4,500 users a week ago to 130,000 last Friday (and 190,000 today!).... and GregT got high billing on Facebook's Recently Popular apps page with his derivative, My Aquarium.

Zombies keep biting... who'd'a'thunk they'd get 1 million users within 2 weeks? Well, BlakeC and friends have Causes too, which is #31 on our momentum list - so they clearly get the Facebook crowd... Which is why they've now introduced Vampires, cause they know a good idea is worth doing twice ;)

Astrolis keeps rolling out derivative astrological apps, many of which pop up on our lists... Chinese Horoscopes has teh #14 spot in momentum, but they also hold spot #29 (Numerology), #32 (Tarot) and #50 (Astrology) !

Top Friends and iLike still have respectable growth rates, enough to keep thin in the top 21.

Scrabble-the-face-book-app (trademark Hasbro, I suspect!) is getting some attention, but I expect that name to either change soon or be bought by Hasbro ;)


So - of course - you might ask:

"How has the growth rates of these apps changed from week to week?" or
"what about the new Apps this week whose growth rate couldn't be calculated?" or
"What about the apps ranked #22 through #101 using this momentum indicator?"... or...
"Which apps added the most users this past week, regardless of their current size?"...

We have all that data... so ASK! We're trying to figure out what's most useful here... so give us some feedback.

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...

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...