There are a lot IM networks/services out there and almost every country has a favorite one (almost like social networks/community) which has the highest penetration.
The folks at EQO used their IM network to investigate on the use of IM services by country, check out Global Instant Messaging Market Share – Open Data:
It seems almost unfathomable that there can be networks with active accounts numbering in the 100 MMs to billions and total accounts certainly in the billions for which there is no detailed public market share data.
Based on EQO’s IM interconnect capability we’ve been able to take a look inside the major IM networks to see the competitive landscape and broken down the stats by country – and like any good disruptive player we thought the data should be public.
Some results from the report: AIM: USA (36% market share); GTalk: India (35%), Japan (26%) and South Africa (26%); Yahoo!IM is faved by India, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia (>50%-70%); ICQ is strong in Germany (44%) and Russia (56%).
Very, very interesting data if you need to do some research on IM services and worldwide usage. You will miss some networks in this report though, e.g. they don’t connect to Skype – so no numbers about this service.
Do you have further insights and information about the IM market? Let us know in the comments!