Although the leader of this week’s AppData list of the fastest-gaining games on Facebook by monthly active users is by a top five developer, Playdom, most of the remaining titles are from smaller companies.
Here’s the full top 20:
|
Top Gainers This Week – Games
|
| Name | MAU | Gain | Gain,% | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. |  City of Wonder |
5,168,037 | +2,561,154 | +98% |
| 2. |  Millionaire City |
6,504,892 | +644,030 | +11% |
| 3. |  Texas HoldEm Poker |
33,119,003 | +618,547 | +2% |
| 4. |  Kingdoms of Camelot |
5,682,636 | +404,269 | +8% |
| 5. |  Tattoo City |
2,612,159 | +355,384 | +16% |
| 6. |  Nightclub City |
7,958,877 | +346,242 | +5% |
| 7. |  The Price Is Right Game |
778,940 | +312,101 | +67% |
| 8. |  MMA Pro Fighter |
1,856,988 | +301,013 | +19% |
| 9. |  Monster World |
3,229,146 | +294,488 | +10% |
| 10. |  Games |
6,501,445 | +228,719 | +4% |
| 11. |  Lucky Train |
971,569 | +200,874 | +26% |
| 12. |  Car Town |
3,859,818 | +195,758 | +5% |
| 13. |  Mall World |
4,719,576 | +166,071 | +4% |
| 14. |  Okey |
3,405,130 | +155,708 | +5% |
| 15. |  Backyard Monsters |
1,300,307 | +152,972 | +13% |
| 16. |  ???? |
969,108 | +135,955 | +16% |
| 17. |  Gift Creator |
2,727,487 | +127,591 | +5% |
| 18. |  Critter Island |
133,459 | +125,184 | +1,513% |
| 19. |  Free Flash Games |
708,738 | +118,962 | +20% |
| 20. |  Profile Song |
3,203,509 | +118,139 | +4% |
City of Wonder is the performing title from Playdom, coming in with 2.4 million new MAU, four times more than the next-closest entry. The new city-building game is the spiritual successor to the older Social City, which is quickly declining — City of Wonder will be the larger title within a few days, at its current rate of growth.
Aside from Texas HoldEm Poker, there aren’t any other games from the big-name developers on the list.
Three games near the top of the list are worth notice for their slow-burn growth. Millionaire City, Kingdoms of Camelot and Nightclub City have all been out for months, but keep adding players nonetheless. It must also be noted that the three developers involved — Digital Chocolate, Kabam and Booyah — are all midsized companies with ambitions to break into the big leagues, so they may be spending significantly on ads.
Tattoo City, at number five, is from WonderHill, a developer that hasn’t previously seen anything near the level of success on Facebook that the new game is bringing. It’s a pretty interesting title, combining the popular store management concept with some guided content generation (the tattoos). Tattoo City does have some problems with engagement, though, with only around five percent of its 2.6 million MAU coming back on a daily basis.
The Price Is Right Game is the smallest title within the top 10, having been released in August by Ludia. Its fast growth is no real surprise, given how many of us likely grew up watching Bob Barker during his 35-year stint as the game show’s host.
Chris Morrison Read more: Inside Social Games
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Involver was founded in Palo Alto, Calif. in 2007 by Rahim Fazal and Noah Horton and provides software and custom development services to its clients. The company aims to help brands and agencies solve four central issues through social media: engage customers, get attention through earned media, automate this process as much as possible and maintain branding.
The company raised initial funding from blue-chip angel investors and since has become profitable. Although Involver was founded in the Silicon Valley the company now employs 60 people and has offices in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Austin, in addition to San Francisco.
We spoke to Involver’s CEO and co-founder Rahim Fazal as part of our ongoing series of Page management company profiles. Most recently we profiled Big Prize Giveaways and Conversation.
Inside Facebook: What products and services does your company provide to clients using Facebook? What types of clients are you aiming to reach?
Rahim Fazal: We have built a platform that enables brands to enter the social web and develop direct relationships with their customers. In my mind, that’s the biggest promise of social. Our history as a technology innovator has allowed us to operate at a scale that is unmatched in our industry, it’s why brands like Facebook, Real Madrid, RCA Music, The White House Commission on Remembrance, and award winning agencies like EVB have chosen to work with us.
On top of our platform, we’ve built more than 30 fully customizable social applications for Facebook and the iPhone along with plug-ins for third-party partners, like Get Satisfaction. We support more than 90,000 brands and agencies across a wide range of verticals and sizes — including several companies in the Fortune 10.
IFB: Can you share some highlights of how your company has helped clients meet their goals using Facebook?
RF: As I mentioned, we work with over 90,000 brands and agencies and through them we have more than 325,000,000 individuals interact with Involver on Facebook. We feel fortunate to have many great customer successes, some of which have provided great recommendations of our platform.
Recently one of our customers, San Francisco based agency EVB, won accolades for their work with Skittles on Facebook, noting that Involver “helped power some of our more innovative social media ideas.”
IFB: Overall, can you share metrics on the scope of your business?
RF: The industry is growing at an incredible pace, and so is Involver. Here are a few interesting stats about us:
IFB: What metrics do you use to determine the success of a given campaign?
RF: We don’t presuppose a set of success metrics on top of our customer to determine their success. We consult with them on their business, understand the challenge/opportunity and how it relates to their individual success and then define success metrics with them. Generally, we see important metrics related to two or three fundamental sets of actions: acquisition (fans, views, likes, etc.), engagement (interactions, comments, shares, etc.), and conversion (registrations, purchases, etc.).
IFB: What have been your biggest challenges building on Facebook platform? What mistakes have you made and learned from there?
RF: Facebook innovates on the platform at breakneck speed. At any given time, Facebook is optimizing existing features to maximize value to their customers. Features that are core to a particular use-case and common in many Facebook applications may change drastically or be deprecated entirely with little to no notice.
In the past, for example, we’ve built technology to support specific features, such as allowing users to subscribe for updates via app notifications, and then had to work double time to maintain consistency with their intended operation as Facebook changes or removes the functionality.
The lesson to be learned from this is something we agreed to on day one: all development must be forward-thinking, built on an extensible infrastructure, agile, and routinely updated — it’s one of the main reasons our customers choose us, so that we can do all that hard work for them.
IFB: Beyond your own efforts, what Facebook changes have noticeably helped your company?
RF: We’ve grown our company by supporting Facebook’s efforts to make Facebook Pages “commercial.” Facebook has done great work encouraging brands to claim their identity, and marketers today understand that you must own your brand on Facebook, along with the entire social web. Facebook’s innovation with Open Graph has been a huge boon, allowing us to provide our customers with tools to engage their audience in a unified manner both on, and off, Facebook.
IFB: On the other hand, has Facebook made any recent changes that have noticeably hurt your company?
RF: As a preferred development consultant (PDC) to Facebook we are made aware of forthcoming changes to Facebook’s platform, and consulted with on the impact of those changes when appropriate, all for the express purpose of making sure that nothing unplanned happens to our customer’s programs. We have a strong relationship with Facebook and that has enabled us to navigate Facebook’s changes with confidence and ease.
IFB: If you could ask Facebook to make a single change, what would it be?
RF: We’d like to continue to see Facebook invest in marketing. We were recently asked to power Facebook Stories. It was a tremendous campaign to work on, and an honor to be asked to power their experience. We believe marketing fuels growth and their growth will continue to support an important channel of our business.
IFB: How does your work on Facebook relate to your work on other platforms?
RF: Our business on, and off, Facebook is all about helping marketers save time and creating efficiency. One of our largest customers recently launched a marketing campaign across Facebook, Twitter, the brand’s website, and Justin.TV. They used our Audience Management platform to moderate customer interaction, measure response, publish update out to the brand’s audience, and display live video content and commenting functionality in multiple digital locations.
Another example of this is the work we’ve done with partners like Get Satisfaction. Together, our two companies are offering a Facebook Page application that gives brands and businesses the ability to integrate their entire customer support experience into Facebook. This application brings the best-of-breed support technology built by Get Satisfaction and deploys it atop the Involver platform, allowing customers to deploy the application to their social profile and unify their support efforts across Facebook, Get Satisfaction, Salesforce, Zendesk, and more. As more applications like this are released atop our platform, you’ll see even deeper integration with other marketing efforts.
IFB: Do you have any specific plans that you can share?
RF: We have several exciting product improvements and partnerships that will be announced in coming months, but don’t generally don’t discuss new products before their launch.
Sara Inés Calderón Read more: Inside Facebook
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Social developer WonderHill has a new theme for an old concept. Rather than making a restaurant, bar, or nightclub, the developer has you building a tattoo parlor in its growing new game, Tattoo City. The concept is a bit more alternative than the company’s past focus on “wholesome” games, although the designs themselves are cartoonish.
The game has also notably grown to 2.6 million monthly active users in the last month, although the daily active user count is has been falling.
The objective of Tattoo City is, obviously, to build up a successful tattoo parlor. It’s pretty easy to do: Players first construct work chairs in their starting shoebox of a space, then hire non-player artists to do the work. For a small amount of coin, these artists will work anywhere from three minutes to two days, earning the player a chunk of change and experience when their “shift” is finished.
In order to hire any artists, however, a work chair, for actually doing tattoos is required, and the number of these in which one can have is gated by the current size of the virtual space, which is, in turn, gated by level. Unfortunately, this can become a bit tiresome to earn, as experience – which, along with money, is picked up FrontierVille-style – is garnered when one hires an artist or they finish. The only other means is a very monotonous selection of tattoos for waiting patrons.
Aside from work chairs, you’ll need to make room for potential customers entering the parlor. While they wait in placed chairs, players can click on them and select what tattoo they can get from a random selection of six. Once chosen, the customer will drop experience and occasionally “ink.” Of course, this cannot be done infinitely, as there is the standard energy bar in Tattoo City as well, and each tattoo selection (along with hiring artists) consumes some of this.
The ink that can occasionally drop is actually the more valuable item to get from customers. This can then be used as a currency for users to create their very own, custom tattoos. Going into a menu of all the tattoos in the game, players can “purchase” the different designs and place them onto a canvas; altering them in a rudimentary fashion. The editing is minimal at best though, consisting of very basic scale, rotate, and flip tools.
It’s actually a very nice idea for the concept of Tattoo City, but the implementation feels stunted in its potential. All the designs are still based around pre-existing templates, and there is no basic drawing or erasing tools. Additionally, the majority of the tattoo templates available are also gated by level. On top of that, the designs don’t appear to do anything aside from appear in the random selection of six when choosing tattoos for a customer. The interface suggests that they could be sharable amongst friends, but if that is possible, it isn’t very clear as to how.
In fact, gifting is the only significant social mechanic of notice in this app. It’s otherwise pretty bland in this area. The only other social feature that is evident is the basic leaderboards at the bottom of the screen and the ability to visit and view other friends’ parlors.
Everything else about Tattoo City is fairly basic as well, consisting of just trying to make one’s virtual space look nice, and cleaning up trash whenever one leaves the game for an extended period of time. Furthermore, the current selection of decorative items does nothing to increase patronage (ala other virtual business titles), and the overall selection is still, currently, a bit low.
Overall, though, Tattoo City is a decent game, with clear opportunities for expansion with the tattoo-creation tool and with parlor feature expansions.
Christopher Mack Read more: Inside Social Games
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Facebook has been quietly adding a “Likes in Common” link to personal profiles in recent weeks. Located in the Likes box beneath Friends and above Photos in the left sidebar, it pops up a window showing which Pages both you and another user are connected to.
Visibility of the Likes panel can be controlled in the Privacy Settings->Basic Directory Information, meaning you are able to see your Likes in Common with non-friends if they allow it. The feature is important to Facebook because it gets users to interact with the Likes panel, increasing the probability that they’ll form new connections with Pages
The Likes panel link states “[#] Likes in Common”, but graphically only shows one or zero of these mutual Likes. This prompts the user to click the link to learn of the others, increasing engagement with the panel. By placing a mutual Like in the far left slot, Facebook creates a trusted recommendation for the as-yet-unliked Pages in the right two slots. Since you already share one Like, you’re inclined to think their other Likes might be of interest as well.
When two people have mutual Likes, there is about a 65% chance that one will be shown graphically in the far left spot. More than one mutual Like is only shown graphically if a user has no other non-mutual Likes.
What’s interesting is the order in which Pages are shown in the All Likes and Mutual Likes tabs of the pop up. While there isn’t an exact hierarchy of how Page categories are ordered, they appear to be grouped into five types which divide the list into regions. At the top are civic categories for Park, Museum/Attraction, and Library/Public Building. Next are brands, products, and services such as categories for Technology Product/Service, Consumer Products, Food/Beverage, Health/Beauty, Professional Service, and Sports/Athletics. In the third region are smaller business categories such as Local Business, Online Store, Store, Restaurant, and Bar. Near the bottom are organization categories including Education, Religious Organization, Politician and Non-profit. At the end of the order are the media categories for TV Show, Movie, Game, Musician, Website, Page, and Application.
These may be ranked to surface Pages from categories like Product/Service which weren’t supported before the interests-to-Likes profile conversion, while demoting categories like Musician of which many users converted multiple interests into Likes. Alternatively, the ranking could simply favor Facebook itself, as the site’s various product and official Pages fall into the preferred second type/region.
Likes in Common offers users interesting data about their similarities with other users while encouraging them to find new Page to connect to. Along with helping to grow Pages, the feature may inspire third-party developers to create a more sophisticated way of determining with whom you have the most overlapping or differing interests.
Josh Constine Read more: Inside Facebook
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This week’s AppData list of fastest-gaining apps by monthly active users offers a few apps, and a lot more interesting games. A couple of the games even blur the lines between gaming and general just-for-fun apps:
|
Top Gainers This Week
|
| Name | MAU | Gain | Gain,% | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. | City of Wonder |
5,168,037 | +2,561,154 | +98% |
| 2. |  SocialBuzz |
12,865,178 | +1,791,833 | +16% |
| 3. | Millionaire City |
6,504,892 | +644,030 | +11% |
| 4. | Texas HoldEm Poker |
33,119,003 | +618,547 | +2% |
| 5. |  Quiz Planet |
8,291,852 | +550,311 | +7% |
| 6. |  Phrases |
29,836,328 | +514,674 | +2% |
| 7. |  Information |
1,080,664 | +488,791 | +83% |
| 8. | Kingdoms of Camelot |
5,682,636 | +404,269 | +8% |
| 9. | Tattoo City |
2,612,159 | +355,384 | +16% |
| 10. | Nightclub City |
7,958,877 | +346,242 | +5% |
| 11. | The Price Is Right Game |
778,940 | +312,101 | +67% |
| 12. | MMA Pro Fighter |
1,856,988 | +301,013 | +19% |
| 13. | Monster World |
3,229,146 | +294,488 | +10% |
| 14. |  Video Chat vChatter |
2,244,701 | +284,565 | +15% |
| 15. |  Give Hearts |
7,982,581 | +278,388 | +4% |
| 16. |  Are YOU Interested? |
7,280,080 | +259,256 | +4% |
| 17. |  iHeart |
12,190,183 | +232,478 | +2% |
| 18. | Games |
6,501,445 | +228,719 | +4% |
| 19. | Lucky Train |
971,569 | +200,874 | +26% |
| 20. | Car Town |
3,859,818 | +195,758 | +5% |
City of Wonder is once again the list’s leader. The new Playdom city-building game is growing almost as fast as the company’s original title in the genre did, Social City.
The two games we refer to above, which bend the boundaries between games and other apps, are The Price Is Right and Tattoo City. The former is a game / trivia show spinoff, much like the highly successful Family Feud, which eventually topped seven million MAU. Tattoo City, meanwhile, includes an element of user-generated content and gifting in its tattoo creation process, although otherwise it’s a virtual space game. We’ll cover the rest of the genre this morning at Inside Social Games.
SocialBuzz is the top non-game app, and the only one besides City of Wonder to pass a million new MAU. The friend quiz is on a streak, having added all of its 12.8 million users in less than a month. Of course, we’ve seen the same happen to several other friend quizzes; the genre’s built-in virality is both boon and curse, as Facebook usually ends up banning the apps.
Quiz Planet, a quiz creator, is also picking up a few new users, although the app is far down from its peak of 19.2 million MAU. Phrases, which works on the quiz creator model, is also plateauing. See our March article on quizzes for more on the different types, and why they work (or don’t).
Video Chat vChatter, the new competitor to ChatRoulette, is on a tear, with 284,565 new users. We reviewed the app back in July, when it was still under a million MAU.
Finally, Are YOU Interested? is now the largest dating app on Facebook, when measuring by MAU. However, it’s still lagging behind Zoosk in terms of daily active users.
Chris Morrison Read more: Inside Facebook
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As I was writing a blog post the other day without thinking I included the words “surfing Facebook”.
Pam Moore Read more: Social Media Today
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