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Inside Facebook

Inside Facebook

Facebook roundup: shares close at $19.05, Instagram deal progresses, Oregon data center to be expanded and more

Posted: 17 Aug 2012 06:00 PM PDT

Facebook shares sink further – Facebook shares closed at $19.05 today, dropping more than 4 percent as the lock-out period ended and large investors were able to begin selling their shares. The number of shares available for trading increased 60 percent on Thursday, which led the stock to fall 6.3 percent that day. In all, Facebook’s value has been cut in half from its IPO price of $38. Over the next nine months, more shares will be freed up, which could push the price even lower.

Instagram deal could be closer to closing - Facebook is reportedly looking to push its acquisition of Instagram forward by using a California law that allows it to issue shares without approval from the Securities and Exchange Commission. The deal has been delayed because of SEC investigations that occur whenever companies make large acquisitions. The U.K.’s Office of Fair Trading approved the deal earlier this week. Until the deal goes through, the two companies must operate independently. Instagram, for example, launched a blog for businesses and added a new photo map feature this week.

Facebook looks to expand Oregon data center – Facebook filed an application with the city of Prineville, Ore., to construct a new data center near its existing facility opened there in April 2011. The proposed 62,000-square-foot building is nicknamed “Sub-Zero” and will house a new type of deep-storage device that powers off when it's not in use. Currently a rack of Facebook servers use about 4.5 kilowatts. Facebook tells Wired that its goal is to have the new servers operate at around 1.5 kW.

Social games and App Center reach new milestones – Facebook shared that there are more than 235 million people playing games on Facebook.com each month, compared to 205 million during this time last year. The number of people playing games on Facebook has grown by 8.4 percent since the beginning of the year. In July, Facebook drove people to the App Store and Google Play more than 170 million times. More than 150 million people used the App Center in the past month. The new section of the site is driving 2.4 times more installs than the previous apps and games dashboard. Facebook also says users who install an app from the App Center are 35 percent more likely than the average user to return to the app the following day and 17 percent more likely to return within a week.

Facebook plans national convention presence - Facebook announced its plans to be involved in both the Republican and Democratic national conventions, including holding events about the social network and its marketing and app platform, giving conventioneers opportunities to share their experience and launching the “I’m Voting” app.

Facebook launches payer promotion API – Facebook released a new API this week to allow social game developers to see whether a person is eligible for a “payer promotion” and then serve them with a custom unit to highlight the offer. The payer promotion, which is subsidized by Facebook, gives certain users a discount on virtual currency. Now in addition to letting users know about these promotions through TrialPay offer walls and DealSpot, developers can create their own in-game units that may increase conversion and lead players to buy more currency.

Olympic Games City, Victoria’s Secret, Waze, Amazon and more on this week’s emerging Facebook apps by MAU

Posted: 17 Aug 2012 03:56 PM PDT

Olympic Games City led our list of emerging Facebook applications by monthly active users this week with 36 percent gain. Last week the game was No. 2 on our list.

We define emerging applications as those that ended with between 100,000 and 1 million MAU in the past week. This week’s top apps grew between 80,000 and 250,000 MAU, based on AppData, our data tracking service covering traffic growth for apps on Facebook.

Top Gainers This Week

Name MAU Gain Gain %
1.  Olympic Games City 950,000 +250,000 + 36%
2.  Rotfltube 360,000 +240,000 + 200%
3.  Know your date 480,000 +210,000 + 78%
4.  Pockie Ninja II Social 730,000 +150,000 + 26%
5.  ★ Quiz Monster 170,000 +140,000 + 467%
6.  Html 320,000 +140,000 + 78%
7.  Dreamland 490,000 +120,000 + 32%
8.  Telly 660,000 +120,000 + 22%
9.  Waze – Drive Social 720,000 +120,000 + 20%
10.  VS Pink iPhone 180,000 +90,000 + 100%
11.  Threads of Mystery 230,000 +90,000 + 64%
12.  Spa Life 400,000 +90,000 + 29%
13.  Silp 590,000 +90,000 + 18%
14.  Family Farm 850,000 +90,000 + 12%
15.  《數位時代》第四屆粉絲團爭霸賽 259,015 +89,015 + 52%
16.  Welcome CANVAS 140,000 +80,000 + 133%
17.  TradableBits 170,000 +80,000 + 89%
18.  Amazon 370,000 +80,000 + 28%
19.  ★ Photo of the day 400,000 +80,000 + 25%
20.  Bil ve Fethet 400,000 +80,000 + 25%

 

Video sharing site Rotfltube came in at No. 2, likely growing because of its Open Graph integration that shares what users watch. A site for saving videos in Pinterest-type fashion, Telly, was No. 8 this week.

Mobile navigation app Waze – Drive Social, which allows users to connect and help each deal with local traffic conditions, had a 20 percent increase in Facebook-connected users, putting it at No. 9.

No. 10 VS Pink iPhone is a mobile app from Victoria’s Secret. Users can download the app to play games, get special offers and learn about contests and events.

All data in this post comes from our traffic tracking service, AppData. Stay tuned next week for our look at the top weekly gainers by monthly active users on Monday, the top weekly gainers by daily active users on Wednesday, and the top emerging apps on Friday.

Social reader apps grow as Facebook tests larger ‘trending articles’ display

Posted: 17 Aug 2012 02:57 PM PDT

A number of news apps are experiencing new growth or a resurgence in monthly active users likely attributable to tests Facebook is conducting in News Feed.

As we’ve seen earlier this year, tweaks in Facebook’s algorithms or changes in design can have a major impact on how many users visit certain apps. Lately, we’ve seen a larger version of the “trending articles” module that suggests news stories based on their popularity among other Facebook users.

The social network has experimented with several different layouts for this feature, including one recently that showed only one article at a time. After this was introduced at the end of May, many social reading applications saw their monthly active user numbers decline, according to our AppData tracking service. Since August, however, Yahoo Social Bar and Washington Post Social Reader picked back up. Smaller news apps like those from NBC News, Wall Street Journal, CNN, Mashable and Grantland, which had relatively static growth through July, have also been on the rise in recent weeks.

Besides the larger format some users are seeing for “trending articles,” Facebook seems to have eliminated the icon that indicated whether or not the user’s reading activity would be shared by clicking on the link. It’s likely that icon deterred users and contributed to these apps’ loss of MAU. With these types of experiments out of developers’ control, it is important to consider other factors to understand an app’s actual level of success. For example, some media outlets may be reaching a demographic  that wasn’t coming to their site before the Facebook integration, or increasing the average number of articles and time spent on site by each visitor.

In addition to the trending articles module for apps that integrate Open Graph, we’ve also seen Facebook test new layouts for how articles appear after users click the Like button on third-party sites.

Facebook returns to No. 2 spot among U.S. video sites, beating Yahoo, Vevo

Posted: 17 Aug 2012 01:15 PM PDT

Facebook is once again the second largest video site in the U.S., according to ComScore.

The social network saw 53 million unique video viewers in July. That’s about a third of Google’s audience, but higher than the number of unique viewers on Yahoo sites and Vevo, both of which were ahead of Facebook in May.

Although Facebook’s viewers are up from 44 million in May, average minutes watched per user is down from 27 to 21.7. That’s fewer minutes per viewer than any other site in the top 10 besides Amazon. Google sites, by comparison, averaged about 525 minutes per viewer. However, ComScore’s data only looks at U.S. video views, so Facebook’s global reach is not reflected in the chart below.

With YouTube, Google still dominates the U.S. web video space, but Facebook could possibly capitalize on its own reach if it ever pushed more in that direction. It seems the social network is heavily focused on photos first, but a number of video sites and apps, including Vevo, Socialcam, Viddy and Chill, have seen positive results from integrating Facebook Open Graph.

With advertisers constantly pushing for new ad formats, we wonder whether Facebook might introduce more video advertising opportunities. With the page post ads now being tested in News Feed, advertisers have more prominent ad space than ever. We could see some companies, particularly movie studios, pushing video ads in this spot.

Among online video ad properties measured by ComScore, Facebook doesn’t even rank. Google, Hulu and a number of video ad networks and exchanges make up the top properties in terms of total ads and minutes viewed.

What Payvment learned about F-commerce that led the company to start Lish.com

Posted: 17 Aug 2012 10:11 AM PDT

Facebook e-commerce platform Payvment launched social discovery and shopping site Lish.com in beta this week.

Lish.com surfaces the top trending products among the more than 4 million products across Payvment's seller network of more than 175,000 merchants. The Pinterest-esque site optimizes for impulse buys, allowing users to make one-click purchases using Paypal. The site also integrates Facebook Open Graph to share users' feelings about different products.

Payvment CEO Jim Stoneham tells us Lish came about based on several insights the team got from its Shopping Mall app launched in February 2011. The canvas app aggregated items from page owners' store tabs, highlighting products your friends liked, items from celebrity sellers, recommendations and more. Users could also search for specific items or browse by category.

Here’s what they learned and how they applied the findings to Lish.

People care about what's trending

As it turned out, 90 percent of clicks were in the "trending products" module off the the lower left side of the page. Somehow this section was more appealing than the products that appeared larger and more front-and-center. With Lish, the company decided to focus exclusively on trending products. The site shows users what is popular among other users based on user purchases, feedback, views and other cues.

Social shoppers don't need a cart

Stoneham also says Payvment realized the average number of products per cart in the Shopping Mall app was 1.1, and the average sale was about $25. That means most users were coming to the app, finding one thing they liked and buying it. Stoneham says it was clear that the shopping cart wasn't necessary. As such, Lish promotes impulse purchases with Paypal one-click buying.

Friends really do influence purchases

Payvment found that product links that users shared to Facebook had a 3.6 percent conversion rate. This is compared to 1 to 2 percent conversion rates that are average for e-commerce sites. For all the talk about how users don't go to Facebook with purchase intent, Payvment has seen that users are quite influenced by their friends and are prone to making impulse buys when they see something they like in News Feed. Lish looks to capitalize on this by promoting sharing through Open Graph. On each product, users can click a smiley-face, meh-face or frowny-face. That activity is then published to Timeline, Ticker and News Feed.

Lish is still in an invite-only period, but Inside Facebook readers should be able to gain access through this link.

lørdag den 18. august 2012 at 07.26