Google is a failure
GTalk is LAST among major IM players (thanks Dare!). Does that mean 3rd? 5th?
Nope … try 10th! In fact, GTalk has only 10% of the user base of ICQ, which was the original IM network (3.3M vs 33.8M users).
By comparison Yahoo Messenger has about 141M users and MSN Messenger has 204M. PLUS now that Yahoo IM and MSN IM are combining their networks that’s 345M accounts (sure there are some duplicates).
Compared to the leading IM network, GTalk is roughly 1% of the market. And did I mention that market is all free for the users so any revenues from all this is eyeballs on ads in the client? So why would I want to buy an add with Google when I’m going to get more exposure on Yahoo/MSN?
The kicker is that there’s a very similar story when you look at traffic to Google’s other properties, like the Finance and Maps pages.
PS – for the record I use Trillian. I knew it was NOTHING compared to the major players, but it’s cool to see there’s still a healthy user base of roughly 1.3M users.
Categories: Uncategorized
