Facebook gamers now number 235 million, 15 percent more than last year

0
inShare

The number of users who play games on Facebook has increased by more than 15 percent since last year, jumping from 205 million to 235 million, according to new data released by the company. A significant amount of the growth has been driven by Facebook's relatively new App Center feature, which is upping both install and return play rates.
When encountering games through the App Center, users are 2.4 times more likely to take the plunge and install them than when using the older system. Perhaps more importantly, 35 percent of those users return to play the game again the next day, with a further 17 percent returning within a week — in the past month alone, the App Center has counted 150 million users, though its total number of "likes" currently stands at just 7.6 million.
Revealed during a talk at GDC Europe, the new figures come just a week after Facebook launched its first real-money gambling game, dubbed Bingo Friendzy. Available exclusively to UK residents over the age of 18, activity from the app is specifically restricted from appearing in other users' feeds. It is not yet clear whether Facebook has plans to launch similar games in more heavily regulated markets such as the US.

Read more »

Facebook Lets You Announce That You’re Expecting A Baby

Facebook seems to be feelings its biological clock ticking, as today it launches a new Timeline event that lets you share that you’re expecting a baby, the due date, and whether it’s a boy or girl. Baby announcements appear in the Celebrations home page sidebar beside birthdays on the day the kid is expected to pop out, along with showing up in the news feed. Facebook tells me it’s exploring whether the feature will power an existing advertising option to target “expecting parents” that could be very lucrative.
This new life event for expecting a baby also opens up a new advertising is another sign that Facebook is maturing as its original user base of college kids from 2004 start hatching little ones who can join Facebook 13 years from now.

The feature replaces a more confusing option to add an “Expected: Child” to your list of family members. You can add a baby life event by selecting the announcement from the Life Events drop down in the publisher on your Timeline. Facebook doesn’t discriminate about who can say they’re expecting. Single, in a civil union, or otherwise, you can still say a kid is on the way.
You can add additional info like who the other parent is, location (is that conceived or where it will be born?), and a longer story. You can set a future publishing date if you want to wait until the bump starts to show. Also, you can add a photo to the story, which might encourage more ultrasounds to end up on Facebook. That Unbaby.me extension for removing photos infants from your feed is about to get a lot more useful if it can detect fetuses too.

Once published, the story will appear in the news feed immediately, and grace the Celebration sidebars of friends’ home pages on the due date. Facebook has offered an “expecting parents” ad targeting option for about six months but it was essentially guessing based on what Pages you Liked and other options.
Now it will have concrete structured data about who’s a parent-to-be. It won’t be using this data to power ad targeting just yet, but you can imagine how useful advertisers would find the ability to accurately target expected parents with ads for maternity clothes, parenting classes, strollers, and anything else someone needs to be a mom or dad. The ads would likely be popular with the rapidly spawning babyTech companies chasing the big money people pay to be world-class moms and dads


Today’s feature release follows the added ability to announce the date of your upcoming marriage on Facebook. And who knows, maybe the push is Zuck’s subtle way of saying him and his new bride are expecting. Just kidding. This is about making Facebook a host for the most important moments in your life, and maybe making some money off those moments down the line.

Read more »

Facebook Groups Let You See Exactly Who Has Viewed Your Photos, Too

In July, Facebook rolled out a new “seen by” feature for groups, which let people know who has seen a post or announcement in that group, and when. And, although Facebook didn’t make much of a song and dance about it at the time, it looks like it is actually offering this feature on photos, too.
As you can see in the screenshot below, the “seen by” feature in photos works just like the “seen by” feature for other group posts: someone who posts a photo to a group can see how many people in that group have viewed it, who those people are, and what time it was that they viewed the photo. And that information is not exclusive just to the poster, either — others in the group can see who viewed a particular picture, too.
The “seen by” feature on a photo was first brought to our attention by Christo Wilson, a computer science PhD student at U.C. Santa Barbara, whose professor, Ben Zhao, was the one who first noticed it appear on a photo of his daughter that he posted to a group of users.
Zhao told TechCrunch in an email that he first noticed it on Friday. “I have a lot of friends who visit a group page we created for my baby daughter, and the first timestamp showed up last night,” he said.
I joined Zhao’s daughter’s page as well, and I could also see the names of all the users who had viewed each photo. This feature doesn’t seem to be appearing on other Facebook groups that I am in, yet.
It’s unclear whether Facebook would ever extend the “seen by” feature to photos that appear on all users’ accounts, not just those of groups.
On the one hand, Facebook has clearly been growing the number of places where people can view who has viewed their content. In May, Facebook added “seen by” details to messages between individual users and groups. Then in July, it appeared on group posts. In that context, it makes sense for it to extend to group photos, and possibly more.
Zhao notes this could be ”a phased rollout and something that will be coming for other more broader contexts as well.”
On the other hand, making something like this more widely used could be viewed as Facebook encroaching too far into how it monitors — and reports — on how the social network gets used. Photos have a more personal nature, and as Josh pointed out when Facebook launched the group “seen by” feature, it would be unlikely this could be used for general photo browsing:

Facebook spends a lot of time fighting spam and scam hawking “profile spy apps” that would supposedly let you see who has viewed your profile. It’s repeatedly stated that no app can do this, and I’d say it’s highly unlikely to ever show who looked at photos. I mean, people might be a lot more apprehensive to browse photos, especially of romantic interests, if they knew other people could see their activity.

But in any case, if privacy concerns and apprehension deters users from looking at photos, that would run counter to Facebook’s bigger strategy to get people using photos more, part of how it hopes to keep people engaged on its platform.
If a feature like this, which basically will tell someone when you have looked at his/her photographs, feels uncomfortable now, there may well be a time when it feels less so. Facebook could be the one to usher in that change.
As Zhao notes, it’s “just another step in the ‘Zuckering’ of our social norms, slowly eroding what most people consider to be over the line from a privacy perspective.” (In his work, Zhao happens to specialize in “large-distributed networks and systems, data mining and modeling, security and privacy, and wireless / mobile systems,” with current projects focused on “querying, modeling and mining massive graphs, analysis of social networks and online communities, and wireless systems and protocols.”)
In groups, that discomfort in any case should be less so — the picture has been sent to a group you are in, so of course you might look at it. That’s slightly different from visiting another user’s (say an ex-boyfriend’s) set of photos and browsing through them all.
And it puts Facebook more in line with Path, which also lets users know who has viewed their “moments.” That alone could be a sign of how Facebook is trying to better tailor its service for those who want to use it in these more personal, traceable ways.
We’re reaching out to Facebook about this feature and will update as we learn more.
Update: Facebook confirmed both that photos posted to groups have been included in the feature since launch, and that the “seen by” feature is only for photos that are part of a group post, not others. “We have not announced plans to extend the seen by feature to other products beyond Messenger and Groups,” the spokesperson said.

Read more »

Facebook: A Fate More Similar To Yahoo Or Google?

Editor’s note: Guest author David Cho is CEO and co-founder of Sidebark, the private photo and video sharing service. Prior to founding Sidebark, he was a leader in Bain & Company’s digital media practice.
How much more valuable do you think Facebook is than Yahoo? Let’s say I gave you 1% of Facebook’s stock. How much of Yahoo would I have to give you to part with that share? 5%? 10%? More? (Or would you just move to Singapore and renounce your U.S. citizenship?)
What about Google stock? Would you make a 1% for 1% trade? What about 0.5% of Google for your 1% Facebook stake?
Well here’s what the stock market thinks: Based on market cap, Facebook is closer in value to Yahoo than it is to Google. After sliding under $20 per share, just two and a half months after going public at $38, Facebook’s market cap hit $45B, closer to Yahoo’s $20B than Google’s $210B.
The two companies represent two possible future states for Facebook. Google: Thriving, a colossus in digital advertising with a stranglehold on search, the kind of company that creates billion dollar businesses out of secondary products. Yahoo: Shrinking, trying to find its identity with a revolving door of CEOs, while seeking ways to improve monetization of its still massive user base.
These two companies pretty much represent heaven (Google) and hell (Yahoo) for Facebook. Or to steal from Dante’s Divine Comedy (no, not this one, this one), Paradiso and Inferno.
Right now, according to Wall Street, Facebook is edging perilously close to Inferno. So what gives? Is Wall Street right, and more importantly, can Facebook find salvation?
By virtually any measure, Facebook runs a fabulous business. With a billion (!) engaged users, Facebook recorded $1.2B in revenue and $300M in profit in its most recent quarter and has $10B in cash to invest in the business.
But the stock market does not reward current performance. Stock prices reflect investors’ expectations about a company’s future performance, and particularly for stocks like Facebook, growth.
This is partly why Facebook’s stock price took a beating after its most recent earnings announcement, even though it met the earnings guidance that it had set for itself. The problem was that many analysts believed that Facebook was “sandbagging” its numbers. The stock price reflected that expectation, and when Facebook merely met its earnings guidance, the stock took a tumble.
So what should we expect for Facebook’s growth? Facebook will almost certainly start to create separation from Yahoo ($1.3B revenue in Q2 2012). But do we think it can eventually grow to Google’s size ($11.0B), nearly 10x bigger than Facebook today?
To get a sense of Facebook’s growth prospects, we can start by breaking down Facebook’s revenue into its component parts: number of users; mix of those users; and average revenue per user (ARPU). Let’s look at each piece individually.
Number of Users: This is all about product, and Facebook has obviously crushed it here. They have added 250M users in each of the past three years, and these users are becoming ever more engaged on the site. But how much growth is really left? In the US, its most mature market, Facebook grew its user base just 5% in April vs. the same time last year. In many other markets, Facebook appears to be hitting saturation as well. While some headroom still remains, Facebook is rapidly approaching a point where hyper-growth – driven by growth in users – will plateau.
Mix of Users: What do I mean by mix? Not all users are created equally. A U.S. user is more valuable than an international user, and a web user is more valuable (today) than a mobile user. As has been well-covered, however, engagement is rapidly shifting to mobile, and most of Facebook’s user growth is coming in developing markets. Both factors will serve to mute the impact on revenue that arises from continued growth in users. In other words, even if you believe that Facebook can grow its user base by, say, another billion users, revenue will not necessarily double.
Average revenue per user (ARPU): This one is all about business model, and it is here that Facebook will need to generate consistent growth to find Paradiso. This in turn will come down to two factors: How well it leverages its competitive advantages of scale and data to attract large-scale brand advertising, and how successfully it grows new monetization models like payments.
On the first, Facebook has done well in attracting small and medium businesses and other so-called “performance advertisers” to the platform, but the game will be won or lost based on attracting the billions of dollars that brand advertisers like GM, Proctor & Gamble or AT&T still spend offline. While online advertising has grown to nearly $40B per year, offline advertising (TV, print, radio, etc.) is still a ~$140B market. Facebook’s scale will help in attracting these dollars, but they have hit bumps along the road in doing so.
To help land these brand advertisers, Facebook will also need to continue to be aggressive in how it uses user data to deliver strong ROI. We’ve already seen Facebook experiment here with sponsored stories, using your friends’ likes to insert ads into your mobile feed. I expect we’ll see many more experiments in the future as Facebook uses what it knows about us to improve ROI. In fact, Sidebark, the company I co-founded with Nick Stanev, was founded in part in anticipation that privacy concerns will get worse, not better, on Facebook.
The second factor of finding secondary sources to monetize the user base is a wild card.  Facebook has been successful building payments as a meaningful revenue source, and many pundits have offered other adjacent businesses that Facebook should enter (Facebook phone, anybody?) But I think it’s hard to rely on the discovery of new business models to project Facebook’s growth.
So where does that leave us? Decelerating growth in users, unfavorable change in user mix, and a question mark in ARPU. In the short term, Facebook is certain to grow, but the question of Inferno vs. Paradiso will take quite some time to sort out.  In order to catch up to Google and find Paradiso, Facebook must be aggressive in driving strong ROI for its customers, the advertiser. But to avoid Inferno, they must not kill the golden goose – their amazingly engaging product – through overly aggressive use of user data or otherwise sullying the user experience. It’s a fine balance, so for now, I’ll hedge my bets and say that Facebook is in Purgatorio and take my 1% to Singapore.

Read more »

Facebook And FTC Settle Privacy Charges — No Fine, But 20 Years Of Privacy Audits

Facebook and the FTC today finalized their earlier announced settlement over charges that Facebook had “deceived” its customers by “telling them they could keep their information on Facebook private, and then repeatedly allowing it to be shared and made public.” Unlike this week’s earlier $22.5 million FTC settlement with Google, Facebook does not face any financial penalties. Instead, the company will have to promise that it will give its users “clear and prominent notice” and get their consent before sharing their information beyond their privacy settings. In addition, Facebook will have to submit itself to biennial privacy audits for the next 20 years and maintain a “comprehensive privacy program.”
The FTC launched its investigation into Facebook’s privacy practices in 2011 and the two organizations first announced that they had settled the charges last November. Today’s announcement marks the end of the public comment period and finalizes the settlement agreement.
Here are the details of the settlement. Facebook is:

• barred from making misrepresentations about the privacy or security of consumers’ personal information;
• required to obtain consumers’ affirmative express consent before enacting changes that override their privacy preferences;
• required to prevent anyone from accessing a user’s material more than 30 days after the user has deleted his or her account;
• required to establish and maintain a comprehensive privacy program designed to address privacy risks associated with the development and management of new and existing products and services, and to protect the privacy and confidentiality of consumers’ information; and
• required, within 180 days, and every two years after that for the next 20 years, to obtain independent, third-party audits certifying that it has a privacy program in place that meets or exceeds the requirements of the FTC order, and to ensure that the privacy of consumers’ information is protected.

Just like with Google’s earlier settlement, Commissioner J. Thomas Rosch dissented from the 3-1-1 decision because he questions whether “Facebook’s express denial of liability provided ‘a reason to believe’ that the settlement was ‘in the interest of the public’ and expressing concern that the final consent order may not unequivocally cover all representations made in the Facebook environment.”

You can read the full settlement order here.

Read more »