The Difference Between Total Users and Active Users

Comments (Archived):

1. That’s what’s staggering about Facebook’s self-reported stats: 200 Million active users, 100 Million on the service once a day. http://www.facebook.com/pre…

   1. indeed. facebook is a worldwide juggernaut. they are building the whitepages of the internetit would be interesting to know the total registered user numbersdo you know if they share them publicly?

      1. According to an MZ interview I saw recently they have 300 million registered users.

         1. thanks kwame. so that’s 100mm non-active users. and i bet they don’t spend much time worrying or thinking about them

            1. TechCrunch just said the # is 250mm:http://www.techcrunch.com/2…So 80% active — pretty amazing. Not to mention they have 50mm monthly that is unregistered.

            2. You gotta love facebook. They are doing so much rightThe 50mm unregisted is staggering since you can’t do much if you aren’t logged inOf course they are hell bent to change that and they will

            3. I’m curious how many are “logging into” FB more often through Connect than the actual site like I do, ie. if competition starts to develop better services and people can easily port their social networks over, then all FB has becomes a costly authorization server.

            4. Really early Facebook User here. A lot of us old schoolers’ (aka us young kids) are at least slightly uneasy about the process of opening up Facebook, irrellevnt of APIs.It is a hangout for us, as we form our identities. A number of people my own age keep mentioning to me how much they dislike all the moves made to open up FB, because it means losing the security of that zone to explore our coolness (or fake coolness, alas).If there was a way to conformable switch over to something as clean and nice simply, with massive amount of identity protection- a lot of people would. We’ve been a bit burned by the opening up process- our pictures that we wanted to share easily got shared a little too easily…Same with comments and other thoughts.I miss the old days when it was clearly more sex drugs and rock and roll…now your bosses boss could theoretically check in.

            5. You gotta love facebook. They are doing so much rightThe 50mm unregisted is staggering since you can’t do much if you aren’t logged inOf course they are hell bent to change that and they will

      2. From the source: http://www.facebook.com/pre….

         1. Thanks Jake. I’ll give it a look when I get to a computer

         2. Thanks Jake. I’ll give it a look when I get to a computer

2. Fred, is this your Seth Godin moment? 😉

   1. i’m not sure i get the reference

      1. You’re kidding, right?

         1. No. I am not. I’m being dense I suppose

            1. Okay, I still think you’re dinking with me – but I’ll play along..A typical Seth post would read something like this:Inactive users don’t talk about your service -active ones do.If you make active users happier, they’ll sneeze even more love out to their friends.If you want to win, focus on the people who can help you win – your sneezers! etc, etcI was just suggesting your advice today had a certain Sethness about it.The key difference, of course, is that here we can leave comments….

            2. got it. i’ve leared a lot from seth!!

         2. No. I am not. I’m being dense I suppose

3. Fred, who else do you think is doing a good job helping their best users? Non portfolio companies too 🙂

   1. Well I turn the question a bit. I think open platforms with apis that allow third party developers to build rich additions to the service (like zynga’s games on facebook or tweetdeck on twitter) can do the most to help the super active users

4. I’ve often heard the 1:9:99 rule with regard to content-driven properties (ratio of contributors to curators/commentors to lurkers/readers). Roughly right for Wikipedia, blog comments, forums etc. I wonder if there is a similar ratio for non-content sites (eBay for example, has a large non-active population, defined as people who haven’t traded in a year) and hybrid content/community/commerce sites.In fact I’d like somebody to define a good ratio (maybe with top 5 indicator variables) for a full-richness online property that approaches the social/economic/cultural complexity of offline communities. Can you define the ratio for a healthy thriving town and extrapolate to a rich online property? I suppose FB would come closest to being like a real geographic city.Venkat

   1. Great question. We know facebook has 300mm inhabitants, of which 200mm are activr at last once a month. What we don’t know is how many of them are the super active core who contributes the vast amount of the contentI’d note that foursquare, which I posted about yesterday, calls the person who has checked in the most to a location the ‘mayor’ of that locationSeems like your analogy works for social media

5. Hi Fred: Another very interesting discussion. Not sure I agree, though, with the advice to only focus on active users and that that will solve the problem of inactive ones. If you are in the nice position of having a massive number of active users (which FB is) then you can afford to ignore the inactive ones. However, most businesses are in the opposite position. They need to boost the activity of registered but inactive users. Think of most online retailers, for example, who only convert 5% of their monthly visitors into buyers. Their challenge is figuring out how to get a share of the spending of the visitors / non-buyers. No way to do that without focusing on them and understanding why they visit you but buy elsewhere. Once you know the answers to that you have a shot at addressing the issue. You don’t if all you do is focus on the visitors who buy.

   1. Gian – I agree 100%. If I could get 10% of my inactive http://www.alacrastore.com users to be active the business would be significantly better.

      1. What’s your definition of active and inactive steve? Maybe you need to offer more free stuff so people can be active without having to transactMaybe there needs to be three levels, not two

      2. What’s your definition of active and inactive steve? Maybe you need to offer more free stuff so people can be active without having to transactMaybe there needs to be three levels, not two

   2. Great point Gian. But if someone is visiting regularly but not buying, are they an active user or a non-active user?

6. Aye sir, your membership, your community, your customers is defined by your most active participants. Catering to them is a wise move.Chris Guillebeau just mentioned something similar in June: http://chrisguillebeau.com/…Oh hey so did I earlier last month:http://www.victusspiritus.c…

   1. Thanks for the link. I’ll read it later

      1. Nothing shocking, similar philosophy. I’m trying to nail down when to go outside of your thought sphere. All these viewpoints must be good for seeing problems in many different ways.

7. Depends on one’s target audience I believe, Fred – eg, whether one is aiming at a mainstream audience or at a demographic niche – it seems to me that many new web services plateau out at a certain level of # users because the Geek/Maven communities have registered/had a look and play (at the latest new web service on the hype cycle) and then over time – sometimes hours, not even days or weeks – lapsed in their repeat visits to the extent where they become totally dormant – but registered – users.This initial take-up phase can give very positive feedback, and appear as Active/Repeat Users – informed Geek/Maven users expressing ‘wow/cool’ etc but often there is the danger there is no real substance there and the people giving the feedback may not even remotely meet the profile you were hoping to attract anyway.I believe that in our industry (services) we all need to better understand ‘our’ target users and how the profiles of the users we are acquiring during the initial start-up phases align to the market objectives of the services we are offering.It’s like when you lose a deal in business – it’s a common trait to focus on why a deal was won (to revel in plaudits, etc) but all too often too little substantive attention is given to why a deal was lost – for fear of attributing blame when in fact it should be a perfect opportunity to better understand your market.

   1. That’s a good counter argument. If the service is empty, then its a failure. But if it is full and vibrant, then its worth focusing on the people that are making it successful. It may not be the group you wanted. Look at second life. They’ve got a rabid user base of a million-ish. It may not be what they intended, but its what they have and its a business

      1. Good point/example, Fred – and a salient reminder that one must never forget to be agile in any business – especially this one.Prompted me to do a rough audit of my own repeat usage patterns vs registrations – hardly scientific but a personal insight nonetheless:I’m registered (in bookmarked terms – ie, i thought to be of some substance at some point – there will be many others I chose to not even bookmark, being just a transient peek at something new that didn’t make an impression to warrant bookmarking) with 48 web services/apps and a repeat user of (ie, I visit more than once a week – often daily) just 7.As aggregation/personalized news services become more mainstream this becomes an even more interesting topic/metric …

         1. That’s enlightening. On seven regularly used services. Wow

8. If you have a company that has 3 levels of users: active registered users, non-active registered users, and lastly – active unregistered users (customers) the focus gets a bit more tricky. Focusing on active users becomes an opaque action to the active unregistered users – so you want to try to expose the benefits of becoming active to them while at the same time trying to engage the non-active registered users. I’m curious to hear your thoughts on how you’d attemp to kill two birds with one stone…

   1. I like the idea of “lazy registration” where everyone is registered via their cookie and then you attempt to get them to give you more and more as they use the service more. I don’t like the idea of a binary choice between registered and unregistered. FB Connect and Sign In With Twitter are great tools to get “light registrations”

      1. Very good points.

         1. I’m not sure I can live up to seth level insight

9. Totally agree fred, this applies also to Software, where downloaded are often proudly showcased when what really matter are active users. This is what i talked about yesterday on my blog relating to the stunning numbers of the AppStore but that call a real detail on active usagehttp://ouriel.typepad.com/m…

   1. That’s the elephant in the room for the app store

10. Hey Fred, completely agree. At all my freemium startups we are obsessively focused on active users and within them ‘power users’ – people who have really embraced the service. We focus on getting more users active and more actives to power. Once we have enough power, our feeling is that we can then use our understanding of the power user segments to design great premium services

    1. Smart

11. I’m going to respectively and slightly disagree (a first for me and this blog).I think active users are great and definitely should be paid attention too, but it depends on the numbers. Example, let’s say I’m, oh I don’t know, why not… Twitter, and I have a group of active good users. I could focus on this group and make the system more and more towards this group, but then my service might not grow. If I focus on the people moving from non users to users and making sure their experience is better I might be able to have sustained growth.You could turn the fbook example on it’s head and say if Facebook continued to build for it’s super users you’d have a service that appealed to just the 18 -22 year old “kids” demographic and not to you and me.

    1. This is a great debate. I think what twitter is doing is trying to better showcase its active users to its non-active users. And that is exactly what the active users want. Twitter is an attention getting and attention taking experience at its most fundamental level

12. Not sure I agree. I think this sentiment is a shortcoming of analytics based approaches to site optimization. Analytics tell you only what people have done. Often times what’s more important is knowing why people haven’t done something. This can only be attained through direct observation & communication with your audience (& I don’t mean surveys, rather talking and more importantly listening). Inside those answers are frequently unknown issues, missing features & untapped strategies for conversion.

    1. Interesting point. How can you know what people have not done? User testing, focus groups, surveys?

    2. Interesting point. How can you know what people have not done? User testing, focus groups, surveys?

    3. Actually I find it more complicated it that- you can’t trust what people are saying. You have to go, sit down, and watch them, and then ask about those behaviors, and then try some more watching.If you just did focus groups and asked- there would be no ATMs. People apparently hated the idea when you asked them. You need to sit down and watch people.Further, a lot of design should stem from the body-the hardware is at least an extension of what your hands, mouth, ect are doing. Software, being in some the most apparent extension of your hardware, should be really easily understood as being somehow, in some sort of abstract or real way, to the body and its systems, and the contexts it is put in. I always get shocked/unshocked by how much and how little thought there is put into software based on how humans work in context to the situations they are and the bodies we proudy have.

13. focusing on your core competencies!

14. While focusing on the successful users is a good thought, ultimately it is focusing on the User Experience that trumps everything. A spectacular user experience (something that is easy, intuitive and works as expected) will lead to more successful users, more “active” users and more overall growth. With so many choices for virtually everything on the web, I think humans are most inclined to return to things that are easy, and produce the desired result near flawlessly. Good stuff. Thanks for sparking the discussion!

    1. I cannot argue with that logic

    2. I cannot argue with that logic

    3. One thing to add- it has to be user experience across a multiplicity of platforms. There are a hell lot of screens out there, and a heel lot of ways to input into those screens. I find myself entranced/disenchanted by a variety of services (and from the amount of random conversations- I am not the only one) based of thier relationship they have to the platofrom they are running on.I find a lot of services do need to think about the userbase being active in a variety of contexts that are not wat they expected. The Who, what, when, where why, and how question is one that is consientently seems to be the most complicated and the one that is either addressed in an amazing sort of way, or is really ignored.My example of the moment is that I did not get twitter until I started using third party platforms- linking it to secondard products such as Disqus, and was on the go with it. I find it very weird to use it innately as it stands on the web. Just feels funny. But I know people who love it that way. (now if only I could figure out how to on the fly insert pictures into a twitter stream- I know someone who needs that…)

    4. Spot on, saas.For fear of being accused of shameless self-promotion I try and avoid referencing our personalised news service – ensembli – but I’d love to hear your thoughts on it as this is exactly our objective:http://www.ensembli.com/FYI, I’m @egoboss on Twitter. Cheers, Carl(Hope that’s OK, Fred!)

       1. Its fine carl. Its not like you are showing up once just to spam us.

       2. Don’t want to derail Fred’s discussion, but Guy’s Alltop seems to provide wider coverage. For example, compare ensembli and alltop on topic = education:http://ensembli.com/topic/e…andhttp://education.alltop.com/

15. Active or inactive the keyword is users. If your information is pertinent and your tact clean, it is possible to unite the few lingering. Of course, this will not turn the casual into the punctual but still offers the chance to exude information…. works for us!

16. Interesting post. I’ve been thinking about this lately. There are a lot of “smores” (or “social media whores” as Guy Kawasaki calls them), but how do we identify those really valuable social connectors? It’ll take a lot of time and effort to manually sift through the social networks to find those people. In the next few years, it’d be interesting to see what kind of applications become available that help marketers to identify, discover, segment, report, and analyze the real active, valuable, influential social networkers.

    1. Lets be polite here- they are Social Media Strumpets- ‘;)

17. This used to be one of my pet peeves.RealNetworks used to abuse the difference between the two stats in a way that, at least to me, bordered on investor fraud. They used to parrot the total number of downloads of the real player on every investor call and press release as if that meant anything or was a reliable indicator of the company’s performance. No commentary was ever offered on repeat downloads or the same user downloading each upgrade as they were released.

    1. That’s a sign that the repeat user numbers suck

18. On that note, I think I am going to become active on FriendFeed.

    1. Great move paramendra, super impressed with what those gents have put together

       1. Any pointers you want to share if you are already active at FriendFeed? Any tips?

          1. subscribe to messel (that’s me). I’ll like a bunch of content and you can go from there. I have a post on my blog about my favorite friendfeed sharers. I’ll dm you a link once you’re setup on friendfeed.

             1. Done. Now share the goodies.

             2. Let’s end up on each other’s blogrolls.

             3. The goodies are shared. If you have any other friendfeed questions feel free to ask. I may even have an answer.

             4. You may even have an answer! Ha!Okay, I have a hat for you. You are my very first FriendFeed friend.Let’s celebrate by getting on each other’s blogrolls.

19. the difference is obvious, I doubt whether there’re some guys can’t identify it.

20. Great post. I bet the # of active Myspace account was 30-50% higher two years ago than now. Most of the people that left it probably still have their account but don’t use it much or at all. They still have an active user base I hear, but I think it’s much lower than before.

21. Interesting Sony disclosure re: PSN ‘Develop’ conference: only 25-30% of their 20mm registered users only visit more than once:http://ensembli.com/stories…(videogamer.com)

22. If I may, I will take it one step further. Active users are good, but it’s the super passionate users (aka Raving Fans) that are the key to spreading the WOM. So, focus on them. It’s like a series of concentric circles. The passionates pull in the actives and the actives pull in the inactives. The inactives scale it out to broader. Ripple in the pond. Less is more or as Seth might say “small is the new big.”<shameless plug=””> I wrote a whitepaper (endorsed by Guy Kawasaki, so it’s not total crap) on the subject of the power of Raving Fans: http://bit.ly/HijCT) </shameless>

    1. Thanks. I’ll check out the white paper

23. This is a really good post that sparked off ideas from everyone around.I love the fact that it started with how relative are active users against total users, to how to enhance the customer experience to attract active users, and build on the inactive users.I would agree with saas, as more companies are looking at the user experience level closer, and how to tweak the work flow, simplify existing features, make small user interface changes and hope that it is the catalyst for a customer to identify to the application itself, and say, “This is me.”I believe that this would be a more viable possibility without a major revamp to an app itself.

24. This issue is where Second Life was accused of overhyping its product in 2006-2007 when it spoke of “millions” of signups. Even today it has figures like “14 million residents” by which they mean “14 million people who once tried to download this software and make an account”. The more important figure to look at is the 60-day uniques, those who have logged on at least once in the last 60 days, a figure the MMORPGs look at carefully. That figure then is more like 1.5 million. Then there is what I call the real number beyond that, 460,000 people who spent more than one dollar of virtual currency.While it’s important to focus on the active people, and to an extent you’re right that if you support and privilege them, they will do more to make others attract, you should also be careful not to punish the other people. That is, their account or their inventory or whatever shouldn’t be deleted without notification, and redundant and repetitive notification. I’m still furious that Yahoo put out a notice that they were deprecating the Yahoo Briefcase, they put a mistaken date on their notice, I thought I had longer than I did, and then all my files were deleted. And why? If they can give me unlimited storage in Yahoo email, what was their problem in holding some documents?! And no way to get them back.To be sure, services that we use for free don’t owe us an awful lot, really. And that’s the problem. People will value services, and service providers will value people more when they pay subscriptions or at least have a wallet with currency for micropayments.The way SL and Metaplace and other virtual worlds try to make that log-ons number go up is to give people coins just for logging in, or various presents, points, etc.

    1. Its a great example prokofy