While Sonico becomes the second largest site to deploy Community IM to-date, the service is already reaching more than 10 million users (as of April) across more than 30 partner sites – most of which are social networking properties that unlike Facebook and MySpace, chose not to build their own proprietary chat products.
Inside The Numbers
The 10 million users in April is up handily from March, when the service saw 4.4 million unique users, according to the company. Those numbers will likely see an increase again in May from Sonico’s implementation. A few other interesting stats Meebo executives shared with me this afternoon regarding user adoption:
On social sites where Community IM is in place, about 20 percent actively use the product. In other words, on a social network with 10 million users, 2 million of them are active Meebo users (send at least one IM daily).
Of those active users, the average sends 50 messages per day.
Community IM now accounts for about 20 percent of Meebo’s overall traffic (10M Meebo.com, 30M Meebo Rooms, 10M Community IM).
What’s Next
There are a couple of interesting things coming soon from Meebo and its Community IM product. For one, it plans to expand its focus from social sites where it’s essentially turning an existing social graph into a real-time chat product to content sites, where there aren’t necessarily relationships already in place. It plans to do that through connecting with user’s existing networks elsewhere – think Facebook Connect and MySpace ID, for example.
Meebo Community IM on Sonico
Additionally, Meebo plans to bring monetization to Community IM partner sites, and has started to test ad units similar to the ones you see on Meebo.com, where there’s an ad unit towards the bottom of your screen. Expect more on this in the next month or so.
Where Community IM Fits