Microsoft Messenger claims twice as many active users as Skype
Microsoft Live Contacts offers developers 400+ million active users with 12 billion contact records. That's more than Earth's population, so should we assume a bit of duplication among the 30 contacts per active user?
A peak of 20 million simultaneous online (8.7% of the Live Messenger population, or 1 in 12) is 2 to 3 times more than Skype's reported raw peak usage.
Microsoft says Messenger users make about 10 million daily video calls. Skype's decentralized conversation prevents us from knowing Skype's messaging traffic.
Microsoft is building Live into a hot software development platform, including Live Messenger tools. Live's demographics should be strong bait for Microsoft's developer, co-marketing, and distribution ecosystems. A mashup city worthy of serious phreaking.
More details from Richard MacManus's Read/WriteWeb, one of my favorite blogs, about from the Auckland Microsoft TechEd 2006 conference where George Moore, GM of Windows Live, spoke.
George Moore also told the conference attendees some stats of the current MS active audience -
- 240M Hotmail users,
- 230M Messenger,
- 72M Spaces,
- 8M mobile subscribers.
He tells the mostly developer crowd at TechEd that "this is the audience that can be reached by Windows Live services." He goes on to say that at any one moment,
- 20M people are simultaneously connected on Messenger and
- 5.7 Billion messages are sent per day.
- Also there are 300M F2F video conversations on Messenger every month.
George said Spaces is "now the largest blogging service on the planet" (RM: so it's bigger than blogger.com?) - it grew to 30M accounts in its first 6 months.
Comments
Now...If they could only find methods to use this large group of people to help fix Vista then Santa would be posting more jobs for Elfs :-)
Posted by: ZOverLord | August 21, 2006 05:40 AM
Complete Nonsense. Those statistics are off by a factor of at least 10, and it might even be 1000..... possibly due to the fact that "M" means "mille" (thousand), not "million".
Posted by: aaytch | August 21, 2006 05:41 AM
aaytch - The numbers really are millions. and they are mindblowing. and i believe them. Microsoft's online community has been around a long time. It has many touch points that bring people back into contact with their services. And their services increasingly feed off of each other, so a user's marginal cost of adding a new service falls quickly while the marginal benefit of adding a new service grows.
For example, look for Spaces users to be able to adapt Messenger buddy lists into blogrolls that not only update with new blog posts but that show presence too.
Posted by: Phil Wolff | August 21, 2006 09:01 AM
YOu guys are confusing Users and contact records. The records include things like City, Address, Phone number of each user. So its not unlikely there are 12 billion records for 400 million users.
Posted by: Craig | August 21, 2006 09:50 AM
Rule #1 - Just because someone has Automatic Updates set to ON, or was required to use the "Passport" interface during their lifetime, does not mean they are part of your "Active Users" community. :P
Posted by: ZOverLord | August 21, 2006 10:22 AM
It is anyhow a real sickness in IT and related businesses to inflate numbers (and elsewhere!). Even Skype, claiming 100 million users some months ago, was in fact forgetting part of a word.
What they meant was 100 million USERNAMES. I am sure this is a deliberate mistake. Marketing strategy!
The real number of regular users is about a factor 4 lower, as can be found in one of the slides of Ebay from the beginning of the year.
Posted by: Jean Mercier | August 21, 2006 01:50 PM
Phil,
You don't actually believe that " Messenger users make about 10 million daily video calls", do you?
Posted by: aaytch | August 21, 2006 05:37 PM
When Messenger and Yahoo started talking about IM interoperability last fall, some claimed that the combination was to have about 275 million total accounts. Another measurement from the same era had MSN Messenger at 24.2 million "active" accounts. Since then, as we all know, Skype has been growing rapidly, and so has Googletalk. So when you come along with numbers like 400+ million "active users" for Messenger alone, it's a little hard to believe.
Posted by: aaytch | August 22, 2006 11:09 AM
The bottom line is that Messenger, Googletalk, AIM, Skype, and YahooIM are all in the same general area in terms of comparable active users.... between 10 million and 40 million apiece.
Posted by: aaytch | August 22, 2006 11:47 AM
Maybe it is not so hard to believe if you approach it this way:
First, an active user doesn't mean a human being:
I am three Windows Messenger active users:
- One account for work (using my work e-mail address)
- One for my home computer
- One for my Pocket PC
Second, I'm an equal opportunity user-creator: I have three Skype users for different computers/PDA throughout the house + one dedicated to skype-in only (redirected to call my parents).
Therefore being a Skype user does not exclude being a Windows Messenger user. And that applies to all IM communities. For example, while at home, I am an active user of Live Messenger, Skype and Google Talk (and Yahoo on Sundays to chat with my NFL buddies). When I am at work, I'm on Windows Messenger and I continue to be on Google Talk.
It only takes 133 million human beings with my IM/Voip requirements to come up with 400 million Windows Messenger accounts.
Posted by: Vicente Moranta | August 23, 2006 09:26 PM
how do you get messenger to accept your id to sign in i am having great difficulty to do this after downloading this great system
Posted by: lindsay Gray | June 20, 2007 02:14 PM