Usage share of instant messaging clients

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This is a table comparing the different instant messenger clients available.

Note: that many of the numbers listed in this section are not directly comparable, and some are speculative. Some instant messaging systems are distributed among many different instances and thus difficult to measure in total (e.g. Jabber). While some numbers are given by the owners of a complete instant messaging system, others are provided by commercial vendors of a part of a distributed system. Some companies may be motivated to inflate their numbers in order to increase advertisement earnings or to attract partners, clients, or customers. Importantly, some numbers are reported as the number of "active" users (without a shared standard of that activity), others indicate total user accounts, while others indicate only the users logged in during an instance of peak usage.

Instant messenger client	Company	Usage	Notes
AIM	America Online	53 million active users, "over 100 million" total[1]
Jabber	Jabber, Inc.	between 40 and 50 million[2]	This number is based on calculations of Jabber, Inc.[3] ("nearly 10 million open source users") which differ from those of Process-One[4] ("Our total deployments account for more than 20 millions of accounts"). Process-One is a company providing services based on the Jabber server software ejabberd. Accordingly, as there are many other open source servers (some also with companies behind it), the number provided by Jabber Inc is probably too small. If we presume ejabberd has a 40% market share amongst public and non-public open source server deployments, there are 50 million of users using an open source server. This would mean, including Jabber, Inc.'s numbers, that there are around 90 million of Jabber users instead of 50 million.
Ebuddy	http://www.ebuddy.com/	35 million users (including 4 million mobile)[5]
MSN	Microsoft Corporation	27.2 million active[1], 155 million total[6]
Yahoo! Messenger	Yahoo!, Inc.	22 million users[1]
QQ	Tencent Holdings Limited	20 million peak online users, 221 million "active"[7]
Sametime	Data unknown or missing. (You can help!)	15 million (enterprise) users[citation needed]
Skype	[1]	14 million peak online (December 2008), 309.3 million total (Q1 2008)[citation needed]
Xfire	Data unknown or missing. (You can help!)	6.1 million users (January 2007)[citation needed]
Gadu-Gadu	Data unknown or missing. (You can help!)	5.6 million users[8]
ICQ	Data unknown or missing. (You can help!)	4 million active[1]
Paltalk	Data unknown or missing. (You can help!)	3.3 million unique visitors per month[9]
MXit	MXit LifeStyle	3 million users (majority in South Africa, more than 200,000 international)[10]	These users are part of the Jabber user base as MXit federates with the Jabber network.
PSYC	Data unknown or missing. (You can help!)	1 million users, daily (majority in Brazil)[11]	Total amount of users cannot be estimated due to the decentralized nature of the protocol.
Meebo	Data unknown or missing. (You can help!)	1 million users[12]
IMVU	http://www.imvu.com/	1 million users[13]

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