Zoom: Did We Say 300 Million Daily Users? JK!
Zoom doesn’t actually have over 300 million daily users, as the company stated last week. That count includes repeat users, who may be using the service multiple times in a single day.
On Wednesday, the video conferencing provider quietly made the clarification, which was noticed by The Verge. The April 22 blog post from Zoom that originally mentioned the company surpassing “300M daily users,” has now been changed to say “300M daily meeting participants.”
The revision seems subtle, but it actually means Zoom isn’t counting for unique users. Instead, the company is merely totaling up the “participants” in each Zoom meeting. So if you have three Zoom meetings in a single day, the company can count you three times, even though you’re one individual user.
“In a blog post on April 22, we unintentionally referred to these participants as ‘users’ and ‘people.’ When we realized this error, we adjusted the wording to ‘participants.’ This was a genuine oversight on our part,” the company told PCMag.
Zoom also used the same metric back on April 1, when the company mentioned it had “200 million daily meeting participants.” However, the actual unique user count remains unclear. The company declined to reveal the exact figure.
Nevertheless, the daily meeting participant metric still shows that Zoom has skyrocketed in popularity since the COVID-19 pandemic began. In December, the daily meeting participant count for the product was at a mere 10 million.
However, other video conferencing products are catching up in popularity. Microsoft Teams was also able to attract 200 million daily meeting participants in a single day this month, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in an earnings call on Wednesday. “Teams now has more than 75 million daily active users,” he added.
Google Meet, on the other hand, has been able to draw 100 million daily meeting participants, with peak daily usage up 30 times since January. The product is also now free for everyone.
