Facebook continues to dominate social referrals

Facebook recently changed its News Feed algorithm in an effort to get more pages to use its visual link-share format, claiming that it’s more effective. A new report by Shareaholic, measuring social referrals, shows that the social network is right. Since September, referrals from Facebook have grown 48.85 percent, and represented 17.41 percent of all website referrals in November.

Facebook was one the biggest gainers among social media sites, along with Stumbleupon and Pinterest.

This shows that more users are clicking on stories with Facebook’s improved sharing format, placing an emphasis on big, bold images.

The findings were based on 200,000 websites from around the world, accounting for more than 250 million unique visitors each month.

Shareaholic’s Danny Wong commented on Facebook’s performance in a blog post:

Facebook’s share grew 48.85% (up 5.07 percentage points), Pinterest’s share grew 30.06% (up 1.11 percentage points) and StumbleUpon’s share grew 54.36% (up 0.30 percentage points). Facebook holds the top spot in the social referrals rankings. Last month, this behemoth of a social network drove more than twice the referrals all 7 of the other social media platforms sent to sites, combined.

Readers: Are you seeing more traffic driven to your site by Facebook?

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Pyramid Solitaire Saga continues King.com’s winning streak, hits 1 million DAU on Facebook

King.com and its “Saga” games are increasing their hold on the Facebook charts — the developer’s newest title, Pyramid Solitaire Saga is its fifth in a row to break the 1 million daily active user threshold.

While Pyramid Solitaire Saga isn’t the fastest  ”Saga” game to reach 1 million DAU — Candy Crush Saga reached the milestone a week faster — King.com tells us the game is its fastest-growing game among U.S. audiences. According to King.com, the game’s traffic boosters are fairly evenly divided between viral posts, cross-promotion from other King.com games and the standard Facebook marketing channels. The developer tells us viral sources are fueling the biggest chunk of Pyramid Solitaire Saga’s success, but declined to share exact numbers with us.

Player acquisition also comes from the developer’s games portal, even though King.com’s games outside of Facebook are designed to be more fast-paced  than the by the “Saga” games on the social network. King.com tells us Facebook is one of the largest acquisition channels for the  games portal; this isn’t too surprising, considering King.com’s games have regularly appeared on our Top 25 games lists ever since it debuted Bubble Saga on the social network in April 2011.

Pyramid Solitaire Saga continues to prove how successful solitaire games can be on Facebook, where three out of the top 10 card games on the platform belong to the subgenre. The game is now the No. 3 card game on Facebook, surpassed only by Zynga’s Texas HoldEm Poker and DoubleDown Interactive’s DoubleDown Casino. King.com tells us  there isn’t much of player crossover between the casino games and Pyramid Solitaire Saga, though, and it doesn’t have to worry about competing with these titles for user numbers.

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Candy Crush Saga continues hot streak among this week’s fastest-growing Facebook games by MAU

King.com’s Candy Crush Saga is once again No. 1 on our list of fastest-growing Facebook games by monthly active users, gaining 2.2 million MAU for a 110 percent increase this week.

Rovio’s Angry Birds added 1 million MAU for a 4 percent gain, securing the No. 2 spot. At No. 3 is King.com’s Bubble Witch Saga with 1 million MAU for a five percent gain.

Disney Playdom had two titles place in the top five spots of this week’s list. Marvel: Avengers Alliance snagged the No. 4 spot with an 18 percent gain of 900,000 MAU, and Disney Animal Kingdom Explorers was up by 145 percent with 710,000 MAU. The developer’s newer title, Armies of Magic, also made a strong showing with 610,000 MAU for a 555 percent increase. The only other game with a greater-than-100 percent increase is Cookapps’ bubble shooter Buggle, which picked up 590,000 MAU for 328 percent growth.

The Hunger Games Adventures appears on our list this week for the first time, taking the No. 20 spot with its gain 290,000 MAU gain for a 43 percent increase. The Hunger Games Adventures steady growth since its March launch is undoubtedly helped by the phenomenal success of the movie; currently the game has 960,000 MAU and 150,000 daily active users. The movie’s box office power is (finally) beginning to wane, though, so it won’t be long before the game has to survive solely on its own merits.

All data in this post comes from our traffic tracking service, AppData. Stay tuned for our look at the fastest-growing games by daily active users on Wednesday and top emerging apps on Friday.

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Angry Birds continues to top the list of fastest-growing Facebook games by DAU

Rovio’s Angry Birds once again topped our list of fastest-growing games by daily active users. Over the past seven days, the strategy puzzler managed to gain 900,000 DAU; down last week from 1.1 million DAU.

Only two games on the list this week saw gains of over 100 percent: Zynga Slingo and EA Popcap’s Solitaire Blitz. The latter managed to rocket onto the chart this week with a gain of 2,300 percent, debuting in the No. 5 spot. Meanwhile, there are four other titles on the list with gains above 50 percent: Hoop De Loop Saga, Marvel: Avengers Alliance, City of the Pyramids (the Arabic version of PyramidVille) and Italian soccer game FantaBook.

Finally, Turkish games 101 YüzBir Okey Plus and Bizim Çiftlik debuted on our list. Farm sim Bizim Çiftlik may sound familiar, as it appeared multiple times on our Emerging Games lists back in November. 101 YüzBir Okey Plus, meanwhile, is based off the popular Turkish tile game Okey.

All data in this post comes from our traffic tracking service, AppData. Stay tuned for our look at the top emerging apps on Friday.

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Tiny Tower drama continues as NimbleBit responds to Zynga's... response

by Brandy Shaul, Posted Jan 31st 2012 8:20PM

And the war of words continues this week, as NimbleBit and Zynga's battle over the similarities between the former's Tiny Tower and the latter's Dream Heights has set the industry ablaze with talks of what is and isn't appropriate in the world of design inspirations.

After calling out the Big Z via illustrated letter last week, NimbleBit is now pointing a proverbial finger at Zynga CEO Mark Pincus, who today warned companies like NimbleBit against "throw[ing] stones when you live in glass towers." NimbleBit's Ian Marsh didn't take too kindly to his statement, and has issued one of his own. While speaking to Touch Arcade, Marsh had this to say:

"It is a smart idea for Mark Pincus and Zynga to try and lump all games with the name Tower together as an actual genre whose games borrow from each other. Unfortunately sharing a name or setting does not a genre make. The games Pincus mentions couldn't be more different. Sim Tower is a true "sim" with macroscopic management and fine tuning of a buildings facilities. Tower Bloxx is a timing based high score game.

If you take a quick look before "pulling the lens back" as Pincus suggests, you'll find an innumerable number of details in the game that were painstakingly crafted to be identical to Tiny Tower. These are core gameplay mechanics and rules, not similar settings or themes that games in the same genre might share.

Why are there 5 different business types like Tiny Tower? Why do 5 people fit in an apartment instead of 4 or 6? Why are there VIP elevator riders that perform the same functions as Tiny Tower? Why do businesses employ exactly 3 workers and produce exactly 3 products that are stocked in exactly the same way as Tiny Tower. Even the tutorials at the beginning of the game follow the exact same steps.

All of these things are poorly hidden underneath an uninspired veneer which has become Zynga's trademark."

It doesn't take examination under a microscope to see the similarities between Dream Heights and Tiny Tower, and it also doesn't seem like either developer is going to back down anytime soon. If this ever becomes more than just a war of words, we'll make sure to let you know.

Which side do you take in this debate? Is Zynga guilty of "copycatting" Tiny Tower with Dream Heights, or are there enough differences to easily see that they're two different games? Share your opinions with us in the comments!

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Tags: dream heights, ian marsh, ios games, ipad games, iphone games, mark pincus, nimblebit, tiny tower, zynga

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