When Zynga launched Treasure Isle, I wrote about the economies of scale that enabled them to drive nearly 17,000,000 monthly active users in the game’s first 18 days… staggering figures. Zynga’s latest game, Frontierville, is now 19 days old, and also seeing meteoric growth.

In their first 18 days, Frontierville has markedly fewer monthly actives than Treasure Isle did… but it is worth noting that virality on Facebook has gotten more challenging over the last few weeks (it is always a moving target). Whereas Treasure Isle had 17m monthly uniques, Frontierville has 12m:

12m uniques in a partial month is large by any measure … in fact, it puts Frontierville at #20 on the largest Facebook games list (behind other Zynga properties like: Farmville #1, Texas Holdem Poker #2, Treasure Isle #3, Cafe World #4, Mafia Wars #7, Petville #13, Fishville #17):

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The most impressive aspect of Frontierville’s success is their DAU (daily active users)… a metric that better indicates engagement and retention than monthly uniques. Frontierville is #6 on Facebook by their DAU count (5.3m) and just behind Texas Holdem Poker, Cafe World and Treasure Isle (Farmville and Blackberry are #1 and #2 are orders of magnitude greater: ~20m and 10m respectively):

And when you compare the daily active users to the monthly active users (DAU / MAU) – you get a direct measurement of daily engagement with a game. The DAU / MAU metric is a critical factor as it defines engagement / retention … and in turn helps drive virality (invites, feed posting, etc) and revenue (whether virtual goods, offers or ads).

And this is where Frontierville really shines: of any game, it has the highest DAU/MAU rate at 45%. To put that in perspective, Farmville is #2 and is 30%. Obviously Frontierville’s rates are inflated because they are only 2/3rds through with the month – but even significant discounts over the next 10 days would result in leading rates.

Data and charts are from AppData – the best source for app metrics

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