Facebook’s mobile platform sends 60M visitors a month to apps and games

Facebook’s mobile platform may be starting to live up to its promise, with more than 60 million monthly users engaging with mobile applications via the social network. The company today officially released statistics it first revealed at our Inside Social Apps conference earlier this month. The company's new head of mobile developer relations James Pearce says that single sign-on and the open graph have boosted traffic for developers with more than 60 million users visiting Facebook-connected mobile apps each month. He adds that the average user engages with mobile apps five times per month. But the thing is that many of the example apps Facebook points to aren't necessarily top performers on the iOS or Android charts. The rule of thumb we suggest, is that if a lot of your web-based traffic arrives via viral or social channels, an HTML5 and Facebook-enabled approach might be the best way to come to mobile. But if you derive a lot of traffic through direct visits, a native app is superior and a Facebook integration may be less important. The company highlighted several success stories like BranchOut, which was a launch partner for Facebook’s mobile platform on HTML5. It receives 350,000 visitors every day through Facebook mobile. Wooga’s native iOS version of Diamond Dash has also been popular with Facebook’s mobile users, receiving more than 1.9 million visitors a month from the platform. It's currently ranked around #100 on iOS' top free charts in the U.S. Apps that have integrated Facebook’s Open Graph are typically seeing the most benefit according to Facebook. Foodspotting’s native app has seen the number of visits and shares increase threefold, and traffic to the Yahoo! News web app has increased by three and a half times since implementing the Open Graph. The app now receives 1.6 million visitors a day. Interestingly, Facebook didn’t highlight the performance of any HTML5 games, which got off to a a slow start on the platform due to technical issues. When Inside Mobile Apps looked at the performance of HTML5 apps on the platform a week after launch, uptake was slow, and so far HTML5-only titles like Moblyng’s Word Racer Live and Social Poker Live haven’t been big hits, with current monthly active user counts of just 30,000 and 75,600 according to AppData. In October, Facebook brought many of the viral channels from its website to its mobile apps, incorporating bookmarks, requests, the News Feed, authenticated referrals and Facebook credits to its mobile apps, opening the way for greater discoverability on the platform. This post originally appeared on our sister site, Inside Social Games.

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Facebook’s mobile platform sends 60M visitors a month to apps and games

Kathleen De Vere

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Kathleen De Vere