IM progs - market shares ??

[Eagle_Kiwi]

I've long been fascinated by the relative ebbs and flows of the various IM programs.
But it seems impossible(!?!) to find clear figures on their comparative ratings - not on quality or features, but simply USERS.

Wikipedia seems the best I can find, showing various "User Base" figures (a little past halfway down that page) from various sources at various times.
From this I get basically AIM=53m, MSN=29m, YM=21m, ICQ=15m.

I see some sporadic reports roughly agreeing, while others wildly disagree (e.g. one "authorative" report like this showed ICQ @ just 1.8m!).
While well aware that "statistics can lie", I still feel there MUST be some more authoratative and up-to-date source for such things ?

[Jeff]

Most of these reports ignore Tencent's QQ Messenger, which as of the 2nd quarter of 2004 had 110 million active accounts (most in China).

Many of the reports try to factor in active users, sometimes measuring over a period of time (further complicating the results).

Obviously by total download count, ICQ has probably the most of all, but they've suffered attrition with increased competition from MSN and Yahoo.

[Eagle_Kiwi]

Ahhh, soooo I'm installing QQ now! (I've heard of it from various Chinese friends for many years - weird that it seems now based in SOUTH AFRICA! though).

I've opened a new thread HERE specifically for QQ discussion.

Anyway, I wonder then if
"MSN Messenger has seen the biggest gain in market share of any instant messenger; over 90% in the past year alone"
indeed is true (where DO such claims come from!?)
Maybe that's just in one tiny hamlet in northwest Finland !!?

[Jeff]

Ian, I'm on a quest to collect what reports I can find.

Nielsen//NetRatings reported:

Top Six European Messenger/Chat Applications, Feb 04

1. MSN Messenger
   26,9835,000 unique visits; 22.8% active; 3hr 9min. avg. time online
2. AOL Instant Messenger (proprietary)
   9,817,000 unique; 8.3%; 1hr 28min
3. Yahoo! Messenger
   3,611,000; 3.1%; 3hr 8min
4. ICQ
   2,488,000; 2.1%; 2hr 48min
5. ICQ Lite
   2,208,000; 1.9%; 2hr 15min
6. AIM
   1,426,000; 1.2%; 1hr 6min
7. 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.