Usage share of instant messaging clients

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Note that many of the numbers listed in this section are not directly comparable, and some are speculative. Some instant messaging systems are distributed among many different instances and thus difficult to measure in total (e.g. Jabber). While some numbers are given by the owners of a complete instant messaging system, others are provided by commercial vendors of a part of a distributed system. Some companies may be motivated to inflate their numbers in order to increase advertisement earnings or to attract partners, clients, or customers. Importantly, some numbers are reported as the number of "active" users (without a shared standard of that activity), others indicate total user accounts, while others indicate only the users logged in during an instance of peak usage.

AIM: 53 million active users (September 2006), "over 100 million" total (January 2006).

Jabber: between 40 and 50 million (January 2007). Note that this number is based on calculations of Jabber Inc ("nearly 10 million open source users") which differ from those of Process-One ("Our total deployments account for more than 20 millions of accounts"). Process-One is a company providing services based on the Jabber server software ejabberd. Accordingly, as there are many other open source servers (some also with companies behind it), the number provided by Jabber Inc is probably too small. If we presume ejabberd has a 40% market share amongst public and non-public open source server deployments, there are 50 million of users using an open source server. This would mean, including Jabber Inc's numbers, that there are around 90 million of Jabber users instead of 50 million.

Ebuddy: 35 million users (including 4 million mobile) (October 2006)

MSN: 27.2 million active (September 2006), 155 million total (April 2005).

Yahoo! Messenger: 22 million users (September 2006).

QQ: 20 million peak online users, 221 million "active"^[1] (July 2006).

Sametime: 15 million (enterprise) users (undated)

Skype: 9 million peak online (January 2007), 137 million total (January 2007).

Xfire: 6.1 million users (January 2007)

Gadu-Gadu: 5.6 million users (June 2006).

ICQ: 4 million active (September 2006).

Paltalk: 3.3 million unique visitors per month (August 2006).

MXit: 3 million users (majority in South Africa, more than 200,000 international) (31 January 2007). Note that these users are part of the Jabber user base as MXit federates with the Jabber network.

PSYC: 1 million users, daily (majority in Brazil) (February 2007). Total amount of users cannot be estimated due to the decentralized nature of the protocol.