Windows Live Messenger promotion pays $1+ million for new US customers
Starting from about 18 million US users at the beginning of 2007, Microsoft's Windows Live Messenger picked up 4.3 million more from February through May. That's a healthy clip, 23% in four months.
Microsoft credits some of this growth its cause marketing program, "i'm", which shares WLM ad revenue with ten US charities. With the "i'm making a difference" tag line, Microsoft invites users to put one of ten charities' codes into their display name, with money going to that cause with each message. Microsoft is promising each cause will receive $100,000, for a total of $1 million paid out in the first year of the program.
At reported acquisition rates, about one million monthly, they will have roughly 30 million US accounts after the first year of the i'm program.
| WLM United States |
AOL + Yahoo! + Google United States | |||
| New users | % growth users | New users | % growth users | |
| May | 1,311 | 6.3% | 2,571 | 3.6% |
| Apr | 97 | 0.5% | 228 | 0.3% |
| Mar | 1,410 | 7.3% | 459 | 0.6% |
| Feb | 1,568 | 8.7% | 2,586 | 3.8% |
| 4,386 | 22.8% | 5,844 | 8.3% | |
Thousands of users. Table data provided by Microsoft.
Like Skype, Microsoft's social software products, like their blogging platform, Windows Live Spaces, have bigger user communities ex-US than domestic.
How much is Microsoft paying for its new users? If it's just one million dollars for the i'm programme, Leaving out advertising and word-of-mouth, it comes to $0.08 cents per new user over the first 12 months.
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