Insomanic: Andy Young's Blog

Stickyness and success: Techcrunch has it backwards

Just read the guest post How to measure the true stickiness (and success) of a Facebook app by Nabeel Hyatt from Conduit Labs over at Techcrunch.

Interesting data, but the conclusion is backwards.

“You would expect stickiness to go down as you get huge”. yes, the table he gives shows this to be TRUE:

An increase in MAUs between 9/22 and 10/22 (col 4 > col 5) corresponds with a decrease in DAU/MAU ratio (col 2 < col 3) - and with one exception (RockYou Pets) the opposite is also true - where MAUs went down, stickiness went up.

In other words, all the apps that got MORE users (grew in size) in the last month became LESS sticky. the last row (Cafe World) is the extreme example - it grew MAUs 15x in the month but went from 92% to 33% stickness.

The other point - that stickiness and success are correlated - is surely obvious. if you have a stickier app, your users will visit more often, and assuming it is even the smallest bit viral, this means that your users are spending more time being exposed to that virality and so will invite more friends, so over time you’ll get more total MAUs too.

Put these together and it suggests a different model:

1. stickiness depends on the individual characteristics of each specific app
2. stickiness decreases slowly as apps grow
3. apps with more stickiness are more likely to be successful…