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Facebook has made a significant change to their application reporting metrics. Rather than displaying daily active users, applications now report monthly active users. Previously, Facebook reported application statistics on a daily basis, leading to the creation of Adonomics. Adonomics provided daily reports for all the applications by scraping Facebook’s application pages.
Unfortunately for Adonomics, their service has now been rendered useless. While developers should still be able to view their active daily users from internal Facebook statistics, the daily user activity will no longer be public. Will we see an uproar from the developer community? Probably not. Large applications can now keep many of their statistics private. Additionally, this encourages developers to focus on building more engaging applications.
The application directory has also been updated to report the most active applications on a monthly basis, not on a daily basis. This discourages the creation of one-shot applications that grow rapidly and die just as quick. It will be interesting to see how this change in statistics changes the overall platform landscape. Hat tip to Jakob Keller for the heads up.
Update
After contemplating it for a while and reading Lee Lorenzen’s comment below, I’m not quite sure that Adonomics is useless. If Facebook updates their monthly active users regularly, this new service could still be useful. The main difference is that it will take significantly longer to see applications that have overnight drops in their user base. Adonomics can still be used for monitoring trends just not day to day movements.
Why is Adonomics useless? I am just as interested to see monthly active users graphed as I am daily. Bear in mind that it’s not as if it will only be updated once per month, it is just the total number of unique users that have used an application in the last 30 days.
One thing that I think this will show, is that some games are only played by the same people over and over again, so the monthly active users will seem low in comparison to daily active users.
Just to give an example, I have two main applications. One is a personality questionnaire, which has a surprisingly high number of monthly active users, because it is mostly used by new people each time. I also have a fantasy formula one application, which is mostly used by the same people every day, so it has a surprisingly low number of monthly active users.
Nick,
WRT Adonomics, our business model is tied to providing the best possible analytics and web services available to Facebook and other social network developers. Any changes that Facebook makes, so long as they are applied to all companies equally, will not have a major effect our business model.
WRT the specifics of reporting monthly vs. daily active users, Adonomics will adjust and adapt. This is similar to when Facebook stopped reporting total installs but still showed Daily Active Users as a % of total installs. This allowed us to compute the total installs via a simple formula (although not to the hourly granularity that was true in the first few months that the platform launched).
WRT Adonomics, our site provides a wealth of services to developers and advertisers who want to track their own and their competitors’ apps. The Adonomics 100, the Adonomics Leaderboard, the individual app profile pages, the marketplace, the GEM System, the Ad Management service and the App brokerage service all provide ongoing value. In addition, app developers that want to ensure their app stats are fully insulated from facebook changes can send them directly to us (as 5,000 apps do today).
Thanks,
Lee Lorenzen
CEO, Adonomics
LeeL@altura.com
Why is Adonomics useless? I am just as interested to see monthly active users graphed as I am daily. Bear in mind that it’s not as if it will only be updated once per month, it is just the total number of unique users that have used an application in the last 30 days.
One thing that I think this will show, is that some games are only played by the same people over and over again, so the monthly active users will seem low in comparison to daily active users.
Just to give an example, I have two main applications. One is a personality questionnaire, which has a surprisingly high number of monthly active users, because it is mostly used by new people each time. I also have a fantasy formula one application, which is mostly used by the same people every day, so it has a surprisingly low number of monthly active users.
Nick,
WRT Adonomics, our business model is tied to providing the best possible analytics and web services available to Facebook and other social network developers. Any changes that Facebook makes, so long as they are applied to all companies equally, will not have a major effect our business model.
WRT the specifics of reporting monthly vs. daily active users, Adonomics will adjust and adapt. This is similar to when Facebook stopped reporting total installs but still showed Daily Active Users as a % of total installs. This allowed us to compute the total installs via a simple formula (although not to the hourly granularity that was true in the first few months that the platform launched).
WRT Adonomics, our site provides a wealth of services to developers and advertisers who want to track their own and their competitors’ apps. The Adonomics 100, the Adonomics Leaderboard, the individual app profile pages, the marketplace, the GEM System, the Ad Management service and the App brokerage service all provide ongoing value. In addition, app developers that want to ensure their app stats are fully insulated from facebook changes can send them directly to us (as 5,000 apps do today).
Thanks,
Lee Lorenzen
CEO, Adonomics
LeeL@altura.com
Hi!
I googled it up and reached your page:
My application’s monthly users just dropped from about 200 to 0. Could it be related with some extensive development job I did tonight? I don’t understand it. Is it common that FB nullify the “monthly active users” data?
(p.s. my app is in my website link)
Cheers
Moshe (Israel)