Is MAU dead?

Question

More and more, I have begun to hear founders share an opinion of mine - MAU is not a very helpful metric anymore. For many (if not most) products, having users that are only active once a month isn't ideal, so measuring and optimizing for weekly and daily use wins out.

I'd love to hear your thoughts! I'm sure many of you are doing great using MAU as your ride-or-die metric, while others have labeled MAU a vanity metric.

Peyton Goen · Accepted Answer

@mitchgillogly Makes sense. My thought is to measure MAU in addition to either DAU or WAU, then focus on how to get monthly users to become weekly or daily users. It's nice to have 10,000 MAU, but if only 3 are WAU, there could be a problem.

Mitch Gillogly · Answer

My startups involved mainly with streaming so we chose WAU as our primary metric

Sam Legge · Answer

I think the measurement is highly dependent on the use cases you are trying to solve. For some MAU might make sense and that one time use might be so powerful it's a sticky product. Might be more interesting to think about what is your measurement of "active" vs "non-active" as a way to think differently about what you measure. Play around with this metric and compare it to others in cohorts, see which ones have stronger correlations to more engaged users. Optimize for that regardless of time-span.

Timo Uustal · Answer

@mitchgillogly @peyton Spot on!

Is MAU dead?

Replies