@andrewchen

I recently asked, and then answered my own question on Quora and wanted to share here as well.

Has Facebook’s DAU/MAU always been ~50%?

According to public info, Facebook’s DAU/MAU is 58% these days. Here’s a link.

It states:

• 901 million monthly active users at the end of March 2012
• 526 million daily active users on average in March 2012

Has Facebook’s DAU/MAU always been this good, as a consequence of its product category (communication/photo-sharing/etc.)? Or was it once a lot worse and was improved over time?

(UPDATE: Here’s a followup question I have about the same topic- Was Facebook’s DAU/MAU ~50% prior to launching the Newsfeed in 2009?)

Answer: Yes, Facebook’s DAU/MAU has been close to 50%, at least since 2009.

Since the DAU/MAU data is only available since 2009, it’s hard to say how things were very early on. However, I theorize that Facebook’s high DAU/MAU has always been high as a natural outcome of the communication-oriented usage of the product. Contrast this to a product category like ecommerce which you are unlikely to use and purchase with every day.

In their recent financial filings, the following chart is shown for Facebook’s DAU and MAU since 2009:

If you do a graph of the DAU/MAU on this data, since 2009, you’ll see that it starts around 45-47% and goes up to a very impressive 58% recently.

(As an aside, another interesting aspect is that Facebook’s MAU growth looks pretty much like a straight line, and so the % growth has been slowing down as of late. The MAU growth was around 23% starting in 2009, but is now down to 6-7% in recent months. See below for a graph on MAU vs % MAU growth)

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