| By Jim Bruene on March 14, 2008 12:40 PM | Comments (5) |
It's been a while since we looked at the actual usage of payment, personal finance, lending, and banking apps on Facebook (previous coverage here; see note 1). And assuming the numbers provided by Facebook are accurate, it's not good news.
Overall, the banking and personal finance apps have anemic usage levels totaling just 263 daily users (for apps with more than 1 daily user). That does not include virtual currencies or stock tracking/investing applications (see note 2). In comparison, the most popular general Facebook app, FunWall, has more than 3 million daily users.
But the number will grow rapidly if major financial institutions add balance inquiry functionality such as (#4) MyMoney from Fiserv's Galaxy unit (previous coverage here) and mShift's Key Point Credit Union app discussed here (only 1 daily user, so it did not make our table). Activity in Facebook personal finance apps yesterday (13 March 2008):
| Name (parent) | Daily Users |
| 1. PayPal (eBay) | 80 |
| 2. Billmonk (Obopay) | 55 |
| 3. LendingClub* | 26 |
| 4. MyMoney (Fiserv) | 17 |
| 5. PayMe | 14 |
| 6. Debt Manager | 10 |
| 7. Prosper | 7 |
| 8. FriendFunds | 7 |
| 9. UPside Visa Card Balance Reader | 6 |
| 10. Web Money | 6 |
| 11. Buxfer | 5 |
| 12. IOU (Sanjay Madan) | 5 |
| 13. Split It (TD Bank) | 4 |
| 14. MoneyExchange (Revolution Money) | 4 |
| 15. IOU (Jonas Neubert) | 3 |
| 16. Mortgage Calculator | 3 |
| 17. BillTrack | 3 |
| 18. Insurance Marketplace | 2 |
| 19. Wesabe | 2 |
| 20. FB E-Wallet | 2 |
| 21. Intuit Tax Tips | 2 |
| TOTAL | 263** |
*See comment 1
**Does not include apps with less than 2 users
Notes:
1. You cannot make a meaningful comparison with last summer's activity because Facebook changed the way it reports usage. Previously, the company reported the number of application downloads and now it shows the much, much smaller "active daily user" total. For example, in July 2007, LendingClub had already had more than 11,000 downloads. Under the new measurement system it tallies just 26 daily users which puts it in third place (see table below).
2. The leading stock tracking app, Fantasy Stock Exchange, has 7,990 daily users. The most popular virtual currency AceBucks has 11,300 daily users.
Good post Jim. Please note that the way the Lending Club app is built (and I suspect this is the case with other financial apps), only NEW users counts as "daily active users". Once a Facebook user has signed up with Lending Club through Facebook, that particular user then goes directly to Lendingclub.com in any subsequent visit. This is because the app is only a gateway to lendingclub.com, and is not a functional app. While there are hundreds of Facebook users checking their Lending Club account every day, only first-time users count as "daily active users".
@Renaud
Thanks for the important clarification on how the "daily active user" count works for LendingClub and any other app that essentially acts as a gateway to your web-based services.
Presumably the active user count for an interactive app, such as PayPal's funding badge, would show how many people actually used it that day.
Also important to this discussion is: "Is Daily Users an appropriate measure for financial applications?" Yes, Facebook is excited that so many people visit Facebook everyday, and how many apps people use every day, but we really need to see Weekly and Monthly users before we have a metric that is useful for financial applications." I'm not even sure how Daily Users is calculated. You have to use an app every day for how many consecutive days before you are counted? If you take one day off, you are no longer counted? We really need to understand how this metric works before we put ANY stock in it. How about the Average Number of Users per Day? Let me see that number!
Here Facebook's own explanation of Daily Users:
http://developers.facebook.com/news.php?blog=1&story=30
I find this explanation incomprehensible, telling me absolutely nothing about how this figure is actually computed. Please, Facebook, show us the actual equation used to compute the number arrived at.
I feel like a lot of apps still view Facebook as real estate - just another access point into your service.
I remember John Donovan saying at YES Summit that Lending Club is placing themselves inside of popular social networks "the same way you put a physical branch where people are."
Unless any given app adds value to the interaction that goes on inside of these social networks (for example, iLike is wildly successful in Facebook because it's another personality showcase) - which has to be more than simply being present - use will be scrappy.
I see that Fiserv hasn't responded to this thread, in terms of MyMoney's low daily usage. Is there a product manager or rep from Fiserv that can comment on this thread? I'm not convinced that social network users want (or trust) their account information on their profile pages. I could be a somewhat useful general utility, but it's clearly not a social app. Thoughts?