Accompany with the popularity of the famous game—FarmVille on Facebook, must of us believe that apps are popular among Facebook users. However a new study released by ComScore indicated that Facebook users spend 27 percent of their time on their Newsfeeds, the river of information about their friends, and only 10 percent on applications.
What the most popular Facebook app on Facebook is, it must be FarmVille, a game enables users the ability to “grow delicious fruits and vegetables and raise adorable animals” on their own virtual farms. With nearly 35 million active monthly users and 12 million active daily users, FarmVille has come to our sight as the most popular Facebook application ever. However, why apps on Facebook are not as popular as we think?
It is not surprise that Newsfeeds are the most popular for among users. The very first thing users access the Facebook website are NewsFeed for they want to catch up with what their friends have been saying before doing anything else on Facebook. Users are far more likely to consume it on their News Feed than on a brand’s Facebook Page, 40 to 150 times more likely, in fact. Perhaps this means that instead of spending a massive of time and money on developing cool, attention-grabbing apps for their Facebook Pages, brands might be better off concentrating on crafting compelling, engaging content to share with fans directly through their News Feeds.
Users will slowly lose interest on apps, moving on to other networks and pages. Most users simply use the site to check on their friends. That’s it. Though time spent on Facebook accounts for 90 % of all time spent on social networks, the notion that Facebook games, pages and applications would become a “new” Internet starts to seem unfounded.
If users spend so little time on Facebook apps, why the excitement? Zynga, the site’s biggest provider of games, disclosed that one percent of its users are responsible for 25 to 50 percent of revenue. Zynga filed to IPO, and more generally because tons of Facebook apps are getting zillions of VC money all the time. Firstly, 10% of usage on Facebook, the second biggest site in the world, is still a huge market. Those users who do use apps, use them a lot. Social games are a perfect example: not everyone plays them, but those who do, play them a lot. And a smaller minority pay for virtual goods in those games, but that minority pays enough to fund a thriving social games industry.
For applications makers, they should pay attention that if only 10 percent of the general population’s time is spent on games and only 1 percent of that accounts for significant revenue, it’s probably time to figure out newer ways to monetize their users.
