More Recently Popular Stats

Looking again at the Recently Popular Apps list... it seems it's more important to note which PAGE of that list an app appears on...

So this Scatter Chart shows how many users each app has on each of the first 20 Recently Popular Pages... which just drills home the point that Apps with fewer users are pretty happenin' on the Recently Popular pages...
In fact, there are even 113 apps with less than 100 users on the first 20 pages of the Recently Popular list. "It's lonely at the top" (or... "it's crowded at the bottom").

Recently Popular = not mostly used

We've got new data - from today...
This scatter chart shows how the ranking of each app in terms of it's "Recently Popular" list placement maps to it's ranking on the "Most Users" list. As we reported last week, you are more likely to be listed on the Recently Popular list if you have a low number of users.

Here's an anecdote:

The top 25 Recently Popular apps today (at 10am pst) included the #3 and #100 ranked Most Users... In other words, 23 of 'em ranked below the top 100 most used.

You can clearly see in the histogram the concentration of highly ranked recently popular apps (the lower numbers) to the lower ranked (higher rank values) in terms of most users. Too bad we can't see the "active users" stats - maybe that holds the key to the Recently Popular list... or maybe it's just a promotional tool - which is ok too.

Recently Popular ranks have a sweet spot

On July 31 - when we looked at the "Recently Popular" Apps pages in Facebook, there was clearly (again) very little correlation between high numbers of users and high ranking on that list... (I must say that we have seen on other days a stronger correlation... but i need data to prove that).

However, there was a correlation - but it was to LOW numbers of users... In fact, the sweet spot for appearing in the first 1000 apps on the Recently Popular list was between 100 and 500 users. That's where 33% of the top 1000 were at the time. The next best spot to be - believe it or not - was BELOW 50 USERS! (excitement intentional ;)



Now - this is probably a good example of "so what" for most people, since the top 1000 recently popular is not something that most people see - as they'd have to page through 40 pages of apps to see them all... but a couple of other facts might help:
- 16% of the top 100 (first 4 pages of Recently Popular) had less than 1000 users.
- 9% of the top 100 had more than 100,000 users
- 104 apps out of about 1,700 watched were not in the top 1,000 Recently Popular at all.