Instant Messaging Usage Stats
Posted by Trejkaz Thu, 25 Aug 2005 02:12:00 GMT
It’s not often that the big IM companies give out their statistics. I know, because I posed as a reporter a while back and asked them all what their usage statistics were. AOL was the only one to reply, and they claimed to have 22 million users on ICQ, 35 million users on AIM and 13 million users on AOL-IM.
So it’s interesting when you have someone like ITNews successfully gather some figures and use them in a story.
The figures they give look like this:
| AOL | 41.6 million |
|---|---|
| Yahoo | 19.1 million |
| MSN | 14.1 million |
The first thing to notice is that this AOL figure is a lot lower than the original figure AOL gave me. One explanation might be that they’re counting users with multiple accounts (e.g. users with both AIM and ICQ accounts) as a single user. Another explanation might be that this article is talking about just AIM, which they told me had 35 million users, not far short of the 40 million users stated in this story.
Another explanation again might be that their userbase is shrinking and moving elsewhere. Yahoo’s figure is certainly up from last time I heard about it. They had less than 10 million and were stressing about market share; now they have just under 20 million and are allegedly at second place.
I say “allegedly”, because people always seem to forget about QQ, which supposedly has around 150 million users, most of which are in China. If information about QQ is accurate, it is most likely the largest public IM service in operation today, counting purely in terms of the number of users.
The next interesting thing is that MSN Messenger only has about 14 million users. This puts it behind those two, which is particularly interesting when you consider that in Australia, it seems to have the vast majority of users. Just goes to show how skewed this sort of statistic is if you only count within certain regions.
But really, the most interesting thing is that the last known count of Jabber users was 10 million, which is now not so far behind the other messengers. This figure was obtained before iChat on Mac started shipping with Jabber support (which already caused an enormous boom in the number of users, judging from various web forums,) and was taken more than a year ago, meaning that the number has almost certainly gone up a noticable amount since then.
Anyway, to sum up, this article goes out of the way to say [paraphrasing] “the other services have 14 million users and up now, so Google can’t make a difference.” However, if you count even 10 million users already on Jabber, the numbers look a lot better. Google only need to capture 4 million users at most, and Jabber will have more users than MSN.
That’s good stuff, don’t you agree?