comparison of SNS user growth

several types of user statistics

download numbers
total users
daily active users, DAU
monthly active users, MAU

- defined by each company for its specific purpose
- reported regularly only by listed companies
- data from various sources (company report, news, posts, financial report et al)

FB users increased linearly by 240 million per year.
Wechat and Line shows similar rate of user increase.
LinkedIn, Twitter, Kakaotalk shows much slower growth rate.

In log scale, the slope of graph shows the % increase of users.
Even facebook shows slower rate of user increase (20-30% yoy).
The growth rate of wechat and line is still faster than others ( >100% yoy).
Whatsapp user growth rate is almost the same as wechat and line from limited data points. (not shown)


There are two groups in SNS: fast growing (fb, twitter, linkedin and kakaotalk) and slow growing (Whatsapp, Wechat and Line).


What makes the difference between two groups?

- different user pool size (general vs specialized)
- localization of services or users (china, korea, japan, us, europe...)
- relative phase of each user pool (initial, rapid growing, plateau, decreasing)
- monetization method (free, premium...)
- competition (within messenger apps)



Who will be the winner of mobile platform competition?
Google and Facebook.
Twitter?

Mobile messengers are the fastest growing, but still unproven candidates.
1. Line
2. Wechat
3. Whatsapp (+ Google)?
4. Kakaotalk?
5. etc (Viber, tango, kik, pinger,,,facebook messenger, google hangout,,,)