Ian, I'm on a quest to collect what reports I can find.
Nielsen//NetRatings
reported:
Top Six European Messenger/Chat Applications, Feb 04
- MSN Messenger
26,9835,000 unique visits; 22.8% active; 3hr 9min. avg. time online
- AOL Instant Messenger (proprietary)
9,817,000 unique; 8.3%; 1hr 28min
- Yahoo! Messenger
3,611,000; 3.1%; 3hr 8min
- ICQ
2,488,000; 2.1%; 2hr 48min
- ICQ Lite
2,208,000; 1.9%; 2hr 15min
- AIM
1,426,000; 1.2%; 1hr 6min
- IRC
1,234,000; 1.0%; 5hr 35min
Of course, that was two years ago and only covered Europe. But I was still surprised to see AIM get as many users as it did.
I haven't been able to a complete report of more recent data (they sell it for big $$), but I was able to cull these stats from MercuryNews.com, for December 2005:
Google Talk reached less than 1% of active Internet users in December (7th position overall), in contrast to AIM which reached 33%.
It's not clear what demographic they are measuring, but if I had to venture a guess, I'd say it was North America, or maybe even just within the U.S.
The New York Times
reported:
"Google's vice president for product management, Salar Kamangar, declined to say how many people used Gmail, saying only that there were millions. AOL's instant messenger has 53 million users; MSN's 27 million and Yahoo's 22 million."
If those numbers jibe with the report from the San Jose Mercury, then AOL's 53 million users would be 33% of a total of 160 million users, putting Google Talk's 1% at around 1.6 million users.
Of course, this
still doesn't tell us where the rest of the IM market stands, nor does it specify the scope of the demographic sample.