FanSection Blog

Inside Facebook, operated by Justin Smith who also head up product here at Watercooler, had a post earlier this week about the fastest growing mid-size applications on Facebook.  For the purposes of the post, mid-size applications are defined as those with monthly active users between 100K and 1 million.  It’s interesting to see that three Watercooler/FanSection applications made the Top 10: Philadelphia Phillies Fans, Pittsburgh Steelers Fans, and Team Great Britain Fans.

The first two are obviously being driven by the NFL playoffs as both teams are trying to turn the Super Bowl into the Pennsylvania State Championship, while the Team Great Britain app was originally developed for the Olympics but has since become a vehicle to promote British pride.

For selfish reasons I hope the Eagles and Steelers succeed in their quest since those fan communities are much more active than those for the Baltimore Ravens and Arizona Cardinals.  Below is a look at the monthly active users for both apps.  Notice the huge jump by the Eagles with the more modest jump from Steeler fans.

The performance jump has helped us take a commanding lead for the top developer of sports applications on Facebook with 3.2 million MAUs compared to PageFad, developer of Premier Football, with 630K MAUs. Below is the list of top ten sports apps with Watercooler apps coming in at sixth, seventh, and tenth.

All of those are obviously football and it should be interesting to see how the end of the season impacts these numbers. We’re certainly starting to kick our basketball, hockey, and soccer promotion activities up a notch to make sure we don’t see a drop-off once the football season ends. Until then, we’ll continue to ride Eagles and Steelers fans as long as possible. Here’s to an all PA Super Bowl in a few weeks.