Yearly active users vs. Monthly active users

Firefox Public Data
#1

Hi there,

First of all thanks for the great job making all this data available!

I am a bit confused about the numbers of Yearly active users vs. Monthly active users. How I understand it - and please correct me if I am wrong - that taking for example June 30 2018 870,875,140 individual clients were active in the last 365 days (YAU), while 274,064,220 individual clients were active in the last 28 days (MAU).

Even if this is - as stated - “much more influenced by seasonal factors”, I am still scratching my head about the fact that the MAU is only about 30% of the YAU. Shouldn’t they be more or less the same, with MAU just having some seasonal dips?

Thanks,
Albert

#2

Hi Albert, good question.

It has to do with the distribution of usage frequency for users. Basically, while some users use more then once a month (in which case they get included in MAU), the users that use more then once a year but less then once a month will get included in YAU while for MAU, they’ll only get included for MAU near the weeks that they used. Thats why you have so much more seasonality in MAU, it’s more sensitive to these lower frequency users, whereas YAU is resistant to it.

Hope that helps!

p.s. chutten also wrote a helpful blog post that deals with this question as well!

  • shong
1 Like
#3

Thanks Shong!

That helped and the article really nails it. If I understand it right a unique user gets counted one single time to the 28 days period as well as ones to the 365 days period and there really are 600.000.000 rare visitors.
I guess it is just surprising to see such a high fluctuation, but also interesting. Again thanks for sharing :slight_smile:

1 Like