@andrewchen

Per my previous post on Quora’s stats via the Facebook interface, I wanted to also share another hot startup at the moment, Instagram. Obviously you can use Instagram without Facebook- for example, only connecting it to Twitter, but again it shows the relative growth. In this case, as a mobile app, there’s very little data about how many folks are using it. Facebook’s data gives us unprecedented detail.

Here are the graphs, from AllFacebook – you can see they’re on a nice growth curve and doing quite well:

I ♥ Quora. Oh yes, I’m a fanboy.
As my many of my friends and family know, I love Quora and get a ton of value out of it. It’s incredible to see what some of the most intelligent and influential folks in Silicon Valley and beyond have to say, and it’s some of the most valuable content I read every morning.

My prediction for Quora is that it’s going to turn into a huge, important Internet property- it’ll break out of the Valley network easily and inevitably. The experience of Facebook going from college-to-college will inform a strategy of going topic-to-topic, profession-to-profession, and network-to-network. I can easily see how the Q&A mechanics would apply to many other things, especially the political blogosphere and Beltway insiders, the entertainment industry in LA, the media and advertising industry, as well as random everyday stuff. And of course, it’s one of the best executed products I’ve seen in a long time- the interaction design in the product is amazing.

Writing down all the things that product designers and entrepreneurs can learn from studying Quora would be many blog posts in itself. Like I said, I’m a fanboy

Facebook app data shows stats for connected sites and products, including Quora
All the fanboys want to know: Quora’s been growing, but how fast? I recently realized that because Facebook sign-in is used so aggressively by Quora, they will end up getting listed as an app just like everyone else. As a result, Facebook (for better or worse) ends up publishing their DAU and MAU stats, which are then stored and graphed on services like AppData, AllFacebook’s stats service, and others. This establishes a lower-bound for all the core users who have authed to Facebook, but obviously doesn’t count users who bounce or who don’t sign up, etc.

I included the public listings for Quora excerpted from both AllFacebook and AppData. (Both are great services, I’d encourage you to try them). As you can see from the graphs, Quora is growing on a very nice clip, over 2X larger in MAU over the last month. Very nice!

Caveats: These numbers ought to be a lower bound since not everyone is going to either 1) register on Quora, nor 2) connect their Facebook accounts. As a result, I’m sure the real uniques number is much larger, but this is probably a good estimate of the active Quora community. I’ve also seen a lot of Quora answers in my search engine result pages, so I’m sure there’s easily a multiple that come purely to look at the answers and then bounce, that ought to be added to the totals. So again, think of it as a lower bound, but I imagine that the relative growth trajectory is right.

Again, this is really impressive growth and I look forward to seeing Quora’s progress continue.

PS. For the data geeks out there: If someone else does a more thorough analysis on their historic growth rate, sticky ratio, benchmarks/comparisons, etc., please write it in a comment and I’ll link you. And please point out if I’m misinterpreting these stats!

Just returning briefly from blog vacation to share a couple links and slides I had collected on retention metrics. There’s so little public information out there that I wanted to call out the various articles and presentations that actually do contain real data. Given the difficulty of getting exponentially viral on Facebook these days, most companies are focused on great lifetime value and making it work with big ad buys. Obviously good long-term retention is important for that.

After you calculate out some basic cohort retention analysis, where do you go from there? One key thing is comparing it to existing benchmarks to see if things are going well or badly. Below are some of the few public articles and slides with real data in them.

Here’s a collection of public retention data and discussion

First, from Daniel James of Three Rings:

Twitter retention analysis
RJMetrics, another analytics vendor, did this analysis of Twitter a while back: Twitter Data Analysis. Has some nice graphs like so:

Social gaming data for Facebook apps
And finally, Mixpanel based in San Francisco has some aggregated social gaming data:

• Social Game Developers Use Tutorials to Get Crucial Early Retention
• How to analyze Traffic funnels and retention in Facebook apps

Here’s a nice graph from them:

So what to make of all of this?

For now, you’ll have to look through this data yourself. I have a few rough notes I’ve written up about all of this retention data, and time allowing, I’ll publish some of them later. In the meantime, enjoy the presentations and links.

OK, back to blogging vacation