Fans Versus Active Users: An Analysis Of The Top Facebook Games

THE SOCIAL TIMES — As the Facebook gaming wars continue to heat up, analysts seek as many ways as possible to measure each companies’ gaming success.  Monthly Active Users (MAUs), Daily Active Users (DAUs), Page Views, Monetization… the list goes on.  There are as many ways to measure an application’s success as there are applications in the Facebook directory.  That said, the dimension of user loyalty has always been interesting to me, and the concept of the users-to-fans ratio for a given application does a good job of indicating what percentage of users play the game and publicly demonstrate their affinity by signing up as a fan. Here, we look at the three top game developers on Facebook: Playfish (49m MAU), Crowdstar (49m MAU) and Zynga (230m MAU). We’ll examine the top 5 games from each publisher, and then analyze the fan-to-MAU ratios, as well as apply some insight to the findings...