Facebook's rounding error

Posted by on April 28, 2019 · 1 min read

I was flipping through FB’s most recent 10Q and found an interesting tidbit. The way FB reports its DAU/MAU is with a flat 66%, rounding to the nearest whole number. See below:

However, when you take the DAU and MAU numbers directly from the 10Q and do the math yourself, more granularity gets shown.

OK fine.

The scarier part comes when you look at some of the growth and difference y/y metrics.

Now I don’t know if the raw DAU and MAU data can get more granular for more exact calculations, but the above is a pretty significant graph to see if this has significant digits factored in.

It shows FB “stickiness” starting to decline and could potentially signal something that we aren’t seeing with the social network giant. Is FB rounding up their DAU/MAU calcs to hide the fact that they are slowing down their DAU/MAU averages?