Pictionary-inspired game Draw Something has now passed 50 million total downloads and may have as many as 24 million daily active users. Zynga, which acquired Draw Something-developer OMGPOP for $180 million last month said the game reached the 50 million download mark after 50 days of release.

Somewhat unusually for a mobile app, OMGPOP and Zynga have been providing fairly regular updates on the game’s total download numbers, allowing us to plot the game’s growth. Zynga did not reveal the breakdown of downloads between iOS and Android, or how many of those downloads were for the paid version of the game.

Zynga also declined to reveal the game’s current daily and monthly active users, but it is possible to see how many of the game’s players are logging in through Facebook Connect with our traffic tracking service AppData. Draw Something currently has 32.8 million MAU and 14.4 million DAU, a slight decline from its peak of 14.6 million DAU. It’s important to note AppData’s figures do not represent the game’s total MAU or DAU — last month OMGPOP’s then vice-president Eric von Coelln told Inside Social Games a “large percentage” of the app’s users play the game without logging in with Facebook.

Here’s where the 24 million DAU estimate comes from: As of March 6, OMGPOP revealed the game had about 7.1 million DAU and had been downloaded 12 million times, meaning the game has grown by a meteoric 300 percent in the last month alone.

According to AppData, between March 5 and March 9, Draw Something saw an average DAU of about 4.24 million users, meaning approximately 60 percent of those 7.1 million DAU were logged in with Facebook. Assuming growth remained consistent and that the ratio of players logging in through Facebook versus those don’t has also remained stable, Draw Something’s current DAU is likely somewhere in the range of 24 million players. That’s also in line with von Coelln’s assertion that a significant percentage of Draw Something users weren’t logging in with Facebook.

While these numbers are only rough estimates, they do shed some light on why Zynga was willing to pay $180 million for OMGPOP. In Zynga’s most recent earnings report, the company had over 15 million daily active users on mobile at the end of 2011, meaning the Draw Something acquisition may have more than doubled the company’s mobile footprint overnight. This adds up to a formidable cross promotion network for Zynga and its games. Many developers have told us cross promotion is one of their most valuable mobile marketing channels, and with Zynga investing heavily in mobile – the company has released 15 games in the past six months alone — it’s easy to understand why it was so important for the company to boost its mobile userbase in an increasingly competitive market.