Who’s Using Facebook’s Top Apps?

Who’s Using Facebook’s Top Apps? Newer Games Attract More Older WomenJuly 22nd, 2010
By Chris Morrison Add Comment » Share

[Editor's Note: The data cited in this article is excerpted from Inside Facebook Gold, our membership service tracking Facebook's business and growth around the world. Visit Inside Facebook Gold to learn more about our complete data and analysis offering.]

Last month we shared data for selected Facebook apps that showed diverse audiences across some of the top social gaming titles on the social network. Today we’re following up with stats on another popular set of games that have one key difference: they’re much newer than those we examined in June.

We chose four: FrontierVille and Treasure Isle, both by Zynga; Social City by Playdom; and Hotel City by Playfish. All date back no earlier than March. Looking at newer games allows us to gain some insight into how the audience has changed in the hectic first half of this year.

The first and most obvious insight we came across is that these apps, among the most popular of 2010, have a higher percentage of women than our last sample, which found about a 60/40 split between women and men:
As you can see, the gender distribution has swung even more strongly toward women. In part, this is because there have been few male-friendly hits released this year, like Zynga’s classic Texas HoldEm Poker.

Here’s how the breakdowns look for all four apps:



Women have long been the dominant force in the casual gaming industry, helping to produce estrogen-friendly hits like Diner Dash. While it’s also common knowledge that women play games in greater numbers on Facebook as well, the divide appears to be becoming starker than it was last year.

Of course, the force in casual gaming isn’t just women; it’s middle-aged women. Our next chart shows the age distribution for each of the four games:



Here, we have an interesting split. While the Zynga and Playfish games are almost identical in their age splits (Treasure Isle was exempted for clarity, but is very similar to FrontierVille), Hotel City stands out from the pack with a much younger audience.

Without the presence of Hotel City, it might seem that Facebook gaming is destined for the same almost exclusively female and older audience that casual games target. However, it’s entirely possible that developers are simply playing to the largest audience, while underserving the men and younger players.

For marketers, these results are also notable, for their suggestion that young people and kids who are gaming are moving (or being pushed) into more niche titles — even Hotel City, with its huge base of 8.3 million monthly active users, is smaller than the other games shown above.

The full demographic breakdown by app, as well as extensive audience demographic data for Facebook’s markets around the world, is only available to members of Inside Facebook Gold, our data membership service. To learn more or join, please see gold.insidenetwork.com/facebook


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Filed in Applications, Games, Marketing, Metrics
Facebook’s Hires This Week: Austin, Google and eBayJuly 22nd, 2010
By Sara Inés Calderón Add Comment » Share

Facebook hired people for its sales, analytics and human resources teams this week from competitors like Google and eBay. Our weekly list is derived from LinkedIn. In alphabetical order, here are the new employees:

•Chris Burton will be working as a recruiter for Facebook in Austin and previously worked as an account manager at TEKsystems, and similar positions at Robert Half International, ConsumerReview, CBS Sportsline and PointCast.
•Fred Leach has joined the advertising measurement team and has worked at Better Place, Inc. and Google.
•Scott Lewis has joined Facebook as a risk and compliance analyst and comes from a similar position at eBay. he’s also worked at Deloitte & Touche, S. Lewis Design and Sony Pictures Entertainment.
•Ritesh Mehta is now part of Facebook’s platform operations and comes from a position in enterprise online sales and operations at Google.
•Kate Simpson joined Facebook this week as part of the online sales operations team. She did similar work at ad2-one and as an agency relationship manager at Google.

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Filed in Development, Facebook, Google, International, Policy
RockYou Also Signs on to Exclusive Five-Year Deal for Facebook CreditsJuly 22nd, 2010
By Eric Eldon Add Comment » Share

Last week, RockYou began telling users (and us) about its plans to make Credits the exclusive payment option in its Facebook applications. Today, the company has gone further, announcing a five-year deal to exclusively use Facebook’s in-house virtual currency on the platform.

RockYou is one of the largest developers on the platform, with around 34.6 million monthly active users and 2.70 million daily active users, according to AppData. By getting this commitment, Facebook is ensuring that the company’s user base will start using the currency, thereby furthering its reach across the platform.

Facebook intends for Credits to get more users buying more virtual goods on third party applications than they have through third party payment options. It is experimenting with a variety of promotions to help spur the currency along, including giveaways, and special advertising for third-party developers who adopt it — also signing up other developers to exclusive five-year deals, including CrowdStar and Lolapps.

Meanwhile, some developers have balked at Credits, because Facebook takes a 30% cut — whereas it has taken 0% up until now — and because the implementation of Credits can create additional costs for developers.

For more, see our coverage from last week about RockYou’s Credits integration.


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Filed in Applications, Business, Credits, Monetization, Payments
Facebook Adds Team Focused on Games and Plans New Communication ChannelsJuly 22nd, 2010
By Eric Eldon Add Comment » Share

More big changes are coming to Facebook’s communication channels this year, as Facebook chief technology officer Bret Taylor told us in an interview recently. They’re worth a closer look, as they’re likely to impact all developers, and especially social game developers.

The first is an automated spam filter for all Facebook communication channels. Granted, the spam problem has lessened as Facebook has removed some entirely, like notifications, or scaled back others, like news feed stories and requests. Here’s the relevant excerpt, from Taylor:

So rather than saying you’re not allowed to do X, Y, and Z with a dialog box in your game, if you’re sending useless messages from your game, we just won’t deliver them, and we’ll give you that feedback. And then you can change the way you send messages to send higher signal-to-noise content. This is something that we just haven’t invested enough in, but we now have a very large team working on spam and quality. That will touch all of our communication channels, and news feed. This is going to be a year-long project though, because we’re not going to remove the policies until we know that the system that replaces it is high quality.

Expect Facebook to start sharing more about its plans here in the coming months. If it wasn’t obvious already, given Facebook’s changes to date, developers should think about how to provide useful communication in their apps.

But it’s not just more automated punishment ahead. Taylor also said that the company is giving social gaming a new focus, describing games as a “killer app” on the platform.

> Continue reading on Inside Social Games.


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Filed in Applications, Business
User Survey Results: What Do Young Female Users Think of the Facebook Privacy Debate?July 21st, 2010
By Chris Morrison 1 Comment » Share

[Editor's Note: The data cited in this article is excerpted from Inside Facebook Gold, our membership service tracking Facebook's business and growth around the world. Visit Inside Facebook Gold to learn more about our complete data and analysis offering.]

Facebook privacy is a big issue — at least to some people. In our latest user survey, we set out to research whether ordinary Facebook users are concerned about the social network’s changing privacy policies.

A quick recap on the issue: Facebook has repeatedly run into criticism over user privacy following various product launches, including news feeds, Connect, and the ill-fated ad platform Beacon. This May, public anger at Facebook appeared to reach a fever pitch as the company released new features that would bring up user information on external websites like Yelp and Pandora.

We covered the issues exhaustively on Inside Facebook. However, even our coverage left a question open: do ordinary users care? The loudest voices against Facebook came from the tech community, which one might reasonably expect to have high expectations for being able to customize privacy options. Other users, with less web expertise (and without megaphones) may not feel very strongly.

This question is an important one for brand advertisers, marketers, app developers and other websites that plan to integrate social features. All of these groups are eager for more contact with Facebook’s half-billion users, but they also need to know where the comfort boundaries are.

Below, we focus specifically on survey responses from several dozen female users who are mostly under 25 — an age group one might expect to be fairly tech-savvy.


Our broadest question about Facebook privacy turned up only a small group, 25 percent, that was concerned. A plurality, 39 percent, were neutral, while about an equal number, 36 percent, felt comfortable with the privacy of their information on Facebook.

Interestingly, another question we posed to users (full results are only available on Inside Facebook Gold) shows a change toward a more neutral opinion when we asked specifically about Facebook’s efforts.

Below we asked about user’s confidence levels in using the privacy tools Facebook provides:


Here, a full 50 percent of users have only a moderate level of confidence that they know how to use the tools. This contrasts with another finding, which showed that users were by and large happy with the tools.

This is an area that Facebook could certainly improve upon; many users have been confused about how to add or remove specific information from their pages. Facebook’s regular redesigns likely make this task more difficult.

However, the picture is by and large one of satisfaction. While there is a significant minority, at least of young female users, who feel that privacy is a problem on Facebook, that user group is not currently sizeable enough that it should cause Facebook serious concern — although as we’ve already seen, new problems are only a redesign away.

What does this demographic of users think of privacy on a feature-specific level, and what changes (if any) have they made in how they interact with Facebook? The full results of this survey, as well as extensive demographic data for Facebook’s audiences around the world, is only available to members of Inside Facebook Gold, our data membership service. To learn more or join, please see gold.insidenetwork.com/facebook


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Filed in Advertising, Facebook, Metrics
Facebook Releases C# SDKJuly 21st, 2010
By Mike Knoop 2 Comments » Share


Recently Facebook announced the alpha release of their new C# SDK. This release marks the first C# SDK produced by Facebook, “built to meet the needs of the significant community of Facebook developers using C#”. The new C# SDK has several features, according to Andrew Gode who built it during a recent Facebook hackathon:

•Works with both Web (ASP.NET) and desktop applications.
•Uses OAuth 2.0 for authentication.
•Supports a convenient way of making calls to the new Graph API using the OAuth 2.0 access token.
Notably, C# is a primary platform for the upcoming Windows Phone 7 operating system. Facebook already has an iPhone and Android SDK, so a C# SDK fits well. No word from Facebook on whether this alpha release adheres to the differences between C# for Microsoft’s upcoming mobile operating system and its web/desktop counterpart.

Developers can access and download the Facebook C# SDK from Github today. As this is an alpha release, feedback and support are welcomed.


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Filed in Applications, Development
Facebook Announces 500 Million Users, Stories and Thanks ApplicationsJuly 21st, 2010
By Eric Eldon 3 Comments » Share

Facebook says it has reached 500 million monthly active users “as of this morning,” according to chief executive Mark Zuckerberg. In a blog post today, he also announced a new in-house Stories application that features positive stories from users around the world, relating how they did things like reunited with long-lost family members through the service. Another application, a photo album of sorts called Thanks, shows Zuckerberg and company employees thanking everyone for using the service.



From his post:

We’re launching a new application called Facebook Stories where you can share your own story and read hundreds of others, categorized by themes and locations around the world. These stories include:


Ben Saylor, a 17-year-old high school student, who turned to Facebook to organize a community effort to rebuild the Pioneer Playhouse, the oldest outdoor theater in Kentucky, after it was damaged by floods in May.

Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who, during his time in office, would go jogging with 100 of his fans from Facebook.

Holly Rose, a mother in Phoenix, who credits a friend’s status message telling women to check for breast cancer with her being diagnosed in time to treat the disease. She used Facebook for support during treatment and became a prevention advocate herself.

Here are some more details on the app. There are dozens of themes including “Love” and “College.” A “popular” section will feature the stories with the most likes. Other companies, 31 in total, are featuring some Stories as tabs within their own Pages. And the app is going to be around for awhile: “A team from Facebook will be hitting the open road in the U.S. to meet the people, towns and organizations behind these stories in our first Facebook Stories road trip. We’ll be sharing more details of the trip and initial stops in future posts on this blog and the Facebook Page. Finally, note the Bing integration, as it’s another example of Facebook working with strategic partner Microsoft.

Facebook’s rapid growth in the past few years has made it one of the largest web sites in the world — it gained 100 million users in the last 5 months, by its own measure. That success has also made it a big new target for everyone else in the world, from rival businesses to lawyers, politicians, pundits and even religious leaders. The application is a way for the company to remind everyone that it has grown to 500 million users because its products provide special value to people.






http://www.facebook.com/STOKESAPPS