Facebook's monthly and daily active users increase rapidly, but a deeper analysis of those figures has revealed
that they might not tell the whole story.
The New York Times' Andrew Ross Sorkin last night published a column discussing the method with which Facebook measures daily active users.
"We define a daily active
user as a registered Facebook user who logged in and visited Facebook
through our website or a mobile device, or took
an action to share
content or activity with his or her Facebook friends or connections via a
third-party website that is integrated with Facebook, on a given day,"
Facebook wrote in its S-1 filing papers. "We view DAUs, and DAUs as a
percentage of MAUs, as measures of user engagement."
The director of equity research at Fusion IQ said in his blog that the
daily active users who actually go to Facebook.com appears to be much
lower than the 483 million tally, and from a business perspective, users
who don't visit the site "cannot be marketed to, they do not see any
advertising, they cannot be sold any goods or services."
Still, active users is just one of many metrics that could be used to
determine a company's success and its opportunity for growth. Facebook
co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained at his company's F8
Conference last year that the social network's focus has shifted from counting the number of users on the site to how engaged they are.
He went on to say that his company spent its first five years trying to
add users, but now those folks are looking to "stay connected every
day."
One of the key ways Facebook is trying to help people stay connected is through its Open Graph "actions." The actions help third-party publishers link their content with the social network, allowing users to see what a friend is doing on another site and join in.
From an investment perspective, as both Sorkin and Riholtz point out,
engagement across other sites isn't necessarily a good thing. But
perhaps that's a short-sighted view. Sure, Facebook users are
interacting elsewhere around the Web and not seeing ads on the homepage,
but they're engaged, nonetheless. And with the help of actions and
other "engagement" initiatives Facebook is bringing to its service, it's
trying to make its site the central hub for many of the things people
do on the Internet.
"It's all here, it's your whole life," Zuckerberg said of Facebook's homepage at the F8 conference.
Source:CNET