Original post by INGRID LUNDEN via TC
Facebook’s push for more engagement on its platform, to drive advertising and other monetization efforts (and to counterbalance that drooping stock price), is showing some gains, according to updated figures on both games and app usage released by the company today. Facebook now has 235 million people playing games on Facebook.com, up from 205 million a year ago and up 8.4% since January. And the App Center, Facebook’s newly revamped app marketplace launched in May, is now seeing 150 million monthly users, with 2.4 times more installs of apps compared to Facebook’s old directory/dashboard and a next-day return rate of 35% to those apps after the first install (17% likely to return within a week).
These numbers are on the rise, but they are also somewhat modest: usage of apps and games on the network still work out to less than one quarter of Facebook’s 955 million monthly active users, which paid Facebook 7.5 billion visits in the month of July alone, according to figures from Experian.
Meanwhile, the game development community continues to grow. Facebook notes that currently 5 of the top 10 developers are from Europe: Wooga, King.com, Peak Games, Rovio, and Social Point. This is a big increase on last year, when only one European developer made the top 10, and is another sign of how Facebook’s growth and usage at the moment is largely an international story.
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