Over the past 24 hours, two of the largest Facebook application developers, RockYou and Zynga, have announced relatively large funding rounds. RockYou raised a whopping $50 million and Zynga raised $15.18 million. What are these rounds going toward? RockYou is apparently turning their attention toward the booming social gaming space and expanding their advertising efforts, while Zynga is most likely stocking up on cash to help build out their ever expanding portfolio of popular games.
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A number of applications have been systematically shut down over the past few days due to running aggressive advertisements. Facebook is sending out the following statement to developers, explaining why the apps have been shut down: “Ads are misleading and don’t represent what’s being advertised. Landing pages emulate Facebook features to deceive users and use deceptive billing practice. (Platform Guidelines section #4, 5, 9)”. This is a sign that Facebook is turning up the heat on aggressive ads on all fronts.
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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.
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While RockYou and Slide have been battling for the top developer spot with their Facebook applications, the recent changes made to Facebook’s design have caused an uproar in terms of applications’ status, distribution and permeation.

As Nick noted earlier this month, both RockYou and Slide began to recover from the drop in traffic the Facebook redesign had on their respective applications, and are back to battling it out for the top spot yet again. Nearly two weeks ago it looked as though RockYou would overtake Slide in terms of active montly users, and today we see that this is still the case.
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Over the past few months both big and small developers have been substantially impacted by the Facebook redesign. Many suffered huge plunges in traffic, few of which were able to make adjustments that resulted in a return to normal. Slide for instance had their top application, FunSpace, drop from close to 20 million monthly active users down to a low of 13 million monthly active users in the past months. That’s a whopping 35 percent decrease in traffic.
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