BBM and the rest

Blackberry gave a few operating metrics for BBM today as part of their developer event, at which they stated BBM will go onto iOS 6 and Android ICS+. There are: 

  • 60m active users
  • 51m using it for 90 minutes a day (definition unclear)
  • 10bn messages a day (sent and received)

Blackberry claims that this is 'nearly twice' the message/user/day volume of any other platform, but this isn't quite true: on a sent-and-recieved basis BBM does 167 but Whatsapp does around 100. On a sent basis (assuming a 50/50 split), Kakao does 56 and BBM does 83. 

The two charts below give a somewhat impressionistic sense of the landscape. These are just the biggest players, and the definitions are variable. WeChat has stated 190m active users as opposed to 300m registered: Whatsapp says 'over 200m' actives. In total, there are several billion accounts on all of the services out there (with massive duplication, of course): I've lost count of how many such services there are in total. 

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BBM is now one of many such services, and not the biggest any more. Cross-platform may not be enough. 

(Note - I updated the second chart after Blackberry said it is quoting 10bn messages as both sent and received Link)

Benedict Evans