Monthly Active Users - Explained
What is Monthly Active Users?
Written by J. Mance Gordon
Updated at September 16th, 2021
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Table of Contents
What is Monthly Active Users?How is Monthly Active Users Used?Academic Research on Monthly Active Users (MAU)What is Monthly Active Users?
The number of individuals using an application or visiting a website per month (Monthly Active Users) is a key performance indicator or metric for social media firms and websites offering web content or services.
Back to: ACCOUNTING, TAX, & REPORTING
How is Monthly Active Users Used?
Web service, content, and app companies often depend upon large numbers of users as part of their business model. This is particularly true for companies that sell advertising space to companies seeking to reach these visitors. More visitors would allow a site or app to charge a higher price for advertisement space. As such, this Monthly Active User metric becomes incredibly important. This metric can also be used to measure growth, efficiency in marketing efforts, and customer experience. Of course, this metric must be combined with other metrics - such as time and nature of use - to be truly valuable. For this reason, it can be misleading to compare companies based upon this metric alone.