FarmVille's MUA dominance ends after 15 months

Zynga's social behemoth FarmVille has been toppled from the Facebook app number one spot.

While FarmVille remains the social network's biggest game, Takeoff Money's Phrases app, which offers users daily quotes. This ends Zynga's 15 month reign at the top, though a comeback is far from unlikely.

Phrases now boasts 54.4 million monthly active users, reports AppData, against FarmVille's 53.9 million.

However, an intervention by Facebook (unexplained for now, though it occurred around the time of the social network's most recent privacy breach) has seen Phrases blocked in the US for the last fortnight.

This has led to an ongoing decline from a high of 8.1 million DUAs in mid-November to today's 5.5 million, which is likely to severely impact next month's MUAs. FarmVille, meanwhile, sits at 16 million DUAs.

However, Zynga's game has lost almost over 30 million MUAs since February, following now-resolved altercations with Facebook and changes to user notification policies.

Nonetheless, Zynga games currently constitute half the Facebook app top ten, while the firm is likely to achieve further success with the impending CityVille.

Zynga's success is such that boss Mark Pincus today asserted to the Telegraph that the company was not for sale.

"That is not my goal. I want to build an international treasure; an entity which lasts in people's lives for a long time."

He also said of his firm, which is rumoured to be valued at $5.5 billion, that "I want 'Zynga' to be become to a verb, like 'to Google' has.

"I want people to 'Zynga' each other and for the word to become completely aligned with gaming."