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.

The ratio of DAU and MAU offers a rudimentary method to estimate customer engagement and retention rate over time.

[23] Investment blogs aggregator, like Seeking Alpha, has become significant for professional financial analysts,[24] who give recommendations on buying and selling stocks.

Studies by Frieder and Zittrain (2007)[25] have raised new concerns about how digital communications technologies information reporting have the ability to affect market participants.

In 2008, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission took a cautious approach in revising their public disclosure guidance for social media companies and claim the information to be "supplemental rather than sufficient by themselves".

The active user metric in the context of predictive analytics can be applied in a variety of fields including actuarial science, marketing, finance services, healthcare, online-gaming, and social networking.

Active users can also be used in studies that addresses the issue of mental health problems that could cost the global economy $16 Trillion U.S.

[31] Through web-behavioural analysis, Chuenphitthayavut, Zihuang, and Zhu (2020)[32] discovered that the promotion of informational, social and emotional support that represents media and public perception has positive effects on their research participants behavioural intention to use online mental health intervention.

[36] Based on the number of user's in a particular group, the internet object associated with it, can be deemed as "trending", and as an "area of interest".

With the internet's evolution into a tool used for communications and socialisation, ethical considerations have also shifted from data-driven to "human-centered", further complicating the ethical issues relating with concepts of public and private on online domains, whereby researchers and subjects do not fully understand the terms and conditions[37] Ethical considerations need to be considered in terms of participative consent, data confidentiality-privacy-integrity, and disciplinary-industry-professional norms and accepted standards in cloud computing and big data research.

With the rise internet being used as a social networking tool, active users may face unique challenges in gaining informed consents.

There is yet to be a universally accepted form of industry standards and norms in terms of data-privacy, confidentiality and integrity, a critical ethics consideration, but there has been attempts to design a process to oversee the research activities and data collection to better meet the community and end-user's expectations.

[44] Many social media companies have their respective differences definition and calculation methods of the active users metric.

Wyatt (2008)[45] argues that there is evidence that some metrics reported by social media companies do not appear to be reliable, as it requires categorical judgements, but is still value-relevant to financial statement users.

Weitz, Henry and Rosenthal (2014)[21] suggested that factors that may affect accuracy of metrics like active users include issues relating to definition and calculation, circumstances of deceptive inflation, uncertainty specification and user-shared, duplicate or fake accounts.

Trueman, Wong, and Zhang (2000)[51] have found that in most cases unique visitors and pageviews as a measurement of web-usage accounts for changes in stock prices, and net income in internet companies.

Yielding portfolio more returns may sway investors to vote on a more favourable bonus package for executive management.

Kang, Lee and Na's (2010)[53] research on the global financial crisis in 2007–2008 highlights the importance of prevention of "expropriation incentives" of investors, that provides very prominent implications on corporate governance, especially during an economic shock.