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Inside Facebook

Inside Facebook

Chefville, social readers, Scribd, Causes, BranchOut and more on this week’s top 20 growing Facebook apps by MAU

Posted: 27 Aug 2012 01:51 PM PDT

Zynga’s ChefVille leads our list of the fastest growing Facebook applications by monthly active users this week with 2,141 percent gain that pushed the game past 12 million MAU.

Zynga seems to have put its marketing weight behind Chefville rather than The Ville, which had been a top gainer for several weeks. Now The Ville is the No. 1 app on Facebook overall, but has started to see a decline in users. Last week we noticed that Zynga was promoting Chefville with Facebook’s new search ads, Sponsored Results. Zynga’s Bubble Safari was No. 8 this week, CastleVille was No. 9, Ruby Blast was No. 14 and Zynga Bingo was No. 17.

Titles on our list gained the most MAU of any apps on the platform, growing from between 220,000 and 11.56 million MAU, based on our AppData tracking service.

Top Gainers This Week

Name MAU Gain Gain %
1.  ChefVille 12,100,000 +11,560,000 + 2,141%
2.  Washington Post Social Reader 8,000,000 +2,200,000 + 38%
3.  Yahoo! Social Bar 40,800,000 +2,100,000 + 5%
4.  SongPop 16,700,000 +900,000 + 6%
5.  Instagram 28,300,000 +800,000 + 3%
6.  Scribd 21,700,000 +600,000 + 3%
7.  Zoosk 15,200,000 +600,000 + 4%
8.  Bubble Safari 31,400,000 +500,000 + 2%
9.  CastleVille 16,000,000 +500,000 + 3%
10.  Pinterest 16,800,000 +500,000 + 3%
11.  Dragon City 11,000,000 +400,000 + 4%
12.  schoolFeed 16,800,000 +400,000 + 2%
13.  Causes 3,200,000 +400,000 + 14%
14.  Ruby Blast 3,200,000 +300,000 + 10%
15.  Keek 1,500,000 +300,000 + 25%
16.  Pedido de contato 6,700,000 +300,000 + 5%
17.  Zynga Bingo 7,500,000 +300,000 + 4%
18.  BranchOut 2,900,000 +300,000 + 12%
19.  Samsung Mobile 20,300,000 +300,000 + 2%
20.  Rotfltube 770,000 +220,000 + 40%

 

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

Facebook shows off the size of its News Feed ads

Posted: 27 Aug 2012 12:28 PM PDT

Facebook wants advertisers to know just how big its ads are these days.

In an infographic to explain the power its advertising platform, the company points out that News Feed ads are larger than many traditional display and mobile units.

For years Facebook has had the most precise targeting options, but its ads were too small and structured to get advertisers excited about them. The creative department wants a bigger canvas and the media planners want something that will actually catch people’s attention. Now with page post ads and Sponsored Stories in the feed, Facebook is starting to give brands and agencies something to work with.

There still aren’t options for homepage takeovers or interstitial mobile ads, but advertising has more real estate than ever on Facebook. Desktop News Feed images can be up to 398×398 pixels. Some mobile Sponsored Stories can take up a user’s full phone screen. Then there’s the 850×400 logout ad, although many have doubted whether it’s valuable to reach people when they’re leaving the social network.

News Feed ads, on the other hand, are clearly showing promise. Clickthrough rates are several times higher for feed-based ads than for sidebar ads. TBG Digital found desktop News Feed Sponsored Stories have an average clickthrough rate higher than 0.5 percent, and mobile ads have an average CTR over 1 percent. Nanigans found mobile Sponsored Stories to have an average 12 percent higher clickthrough rate than those on desktop. When combined with interest targeting, CTR has been as high as 2 percent.

The front-and-center placement is not more effective in getting people to click, it also provides greater branding opportunities than the postage stamp-sized ads on the right-hand side of the page. Advertisers can run one large image or showcase up to nine smaller ones. They can include video, polls, links or offers. And just as game developers can create Flash-based mini games that are playable from the desktop feed, we may see brand advertisers create similar interactive experiences that can be promoted as ads.

tirsdag den 28. august 2012 at 07.58