In the month of December alone, the Causes application has experience a decline in monthly active users of more than 25 percent. I previously featured Causes in an article about how they’ve risen to become the largest application on the Facebook platform. Much of the traffic increase was a result of the U.S. Presedential election which concluded on November 5th this year.

Approximately 30 days after the election, Causes’ monthly active users statistics dropped by over 1 million users. This is most likely those users that were driven to the application by the voting status campaign the application held days before the election. Then over the past 30 days, the application has continued the decline from 19 million monthly active users to 14.17 million monthly active, making it the third most active application on the platform.

While the application still has an impressive number of users, it appears that around 20 million monthly active users has become a ceiling for application traffic. RockYou’s Super Wall application was able to hit 22 million monthly active users but has since experienced a rapid decline as well. Perhaps it’s simply a seasonal thing with Facebook traffic.

Whatever the reason for these declines, it’s clear that many applications have peaked and now in contrast to Facebook who has been focused on sustaining growth, need to turn most of their attention to monetization. Launching an ad network has been the typical model for monetizing applications. Without a payment platform, there are few other options (if any) outside of the advertising model.

Causes on the other hand, has been less focused on generating revenue, instead choosing to focus on increasing donations to causes by users of the application (something which has been historically low). This is yet another application that would benefit from a payment platform on Facebook, but for now there are no signs suggesting that the company will launch anything anytime soon.