“Active Users” is a term that refers to individuals who engage with an online platform or application during a specific time period. This term is pivotal in various sectors including business, academia, and research. In business, metrics related to active users aid in predicting growth trends, customer engagement[2], and potential revenue streams. In academia and research, studying active user behavior contributes to the understanding of online behavioral patterns. Ethical considerations around active users shed light on the importance of informed consent[4], data privacy[5], and confidentiality in the online realm. There are also technical challenges in defining and accurately measuring active users due to varying practices across different companies. Additionally, active user data plays a crucial role in predictive analytics[1] and policy considerations regarding technology[3] use and online safety.
Active users is a software performance metric that is commonly used to measure the level of engagement for a particular software product or object, by quantifying the number of active interactions from users or visitors within a relevant range of time (daily, weekly and monthly).
Active users | |
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General information | |
Unit system | Product metric |
Unit of | Media consumption |
Symbol | DAU, WAU, MAU |
The metric has many uses in software management such as in social networking services, online games, or mobile apps, in web analytics such as in web apps, in commerce such as in online banking and in academia, such as in user behavior analytics and predictive analytics. Although having extensive uses in digital behavioural learning, prediction and reporting, it also has impacts on the privacy and security, and ethical factors should be considered thoroughly. It measures how many users visit or interact with the product or service over a given interval or period. However, there is no standard definition of this term, so comparison of the reporting between different providers of this metric is problematic. Also, most providers have the interest to show this number as high as possible, therefore defining even the most minimal interaction as "active". Still the number is a relevant metric to evaluate development of user interaction of a given provider.
This metric is commonly assessed per month as monthly active users (MAU), per week as weekly active users (WAU), per day as daily active users (DAU) and peak concurrent users (PCU).