The Stickiest, Most Addictive, Most Engaging, and Fastest-Growing Social Apps—and How to Measure Them - Andreessen Horowitz

DAU/MAU indicates a product’s “stickiness.” For example: a DAU/MAU ratio of 33 percent would mean that the average user of said app views it 10 out of 30 days in a month.

DAU/MAU doesn’t tell the whole story:

• Those who download the SoundCloud mobile are likely to listen to a lot of music compared to web users. For this reason, in social, DAU/MAU levels are often highest around media consumption.
• Engagement in dating apps tends to be skewed around a core of super-users. Not everyone is looking for love, but those who are are highly active on the app. 

Total time spent per user to be a proxy for how much value users are extracting from the respective app’s network. 

The attention captured metric is the answer to the age-old question, “Is this worth my time?” Of course, not all time spent in apps is equally valuable, from a business standpoint. Consuming TikTok videos for an hour is a dramatically more monetizable behavior than corresponding with friends on Facebook Messenger all day. 

How many users keep using the app post install?

Broadly, messaging apps’ high retention rates are emblematic of network effects: Users seek to communicate with their friends and thus join the networks where their friends are. The more friends a user has on an app, the more valuable the network and the app becomes to the user. 

This pretty much correlates with how people use their phone: playing games, messaging friends, talking about games on Discord, and listening to music.