Wikipedia

Background Info (Source: The Digital Economy Factbook )

Email and Instant Messaging

The most common Internet activity is using email, which 91 percent of Internet users do. Forty-seven percent of Internet users use instant messaging (IM).72

• There are approximately 1.1 billion email users worldwide and 1.4 billion active email accounts.73
• Industries related to email are expected to grow rapidly. The email archiving market is expected to grow from $800 million in 2006 to almost $7.8 billion in 2010. Over the same period, the installed base of the wireless email market is expected to grow from 14 million to 228 million, and revenue in the Enterprise Instant Messaging market is expected to increase at a 23 percent annual rate.74
  
• As of March 2006, Yahoo! and MSN were the most widely used email providers, each with approximately 230 million unique users per month. AOL Mail and Gmail follow, each with approximately 50 million unique users per month.75
  
• In February 2006, 69 million North Americans (37 percent of the online population in North America) used IM applications to communicate online.
• By contrast, 82 million Europeans (49 percent of the online population in Europe) used IM in the same month.
• The region where IM is used most heavily is Latin America, where 64 percent of the online population used it in February 2006.76
• As of late 2005, 32 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers use text messaging.77 The messaging software market had revenues of $2.5 billion in 2005, which is expected to grow to $3.6 billion in 2009.78
• Worldwide, MSN Messenger is the most widely used IM application, with 61 percent of the global market, including more than 90 percent of the Latin American market and more than 70 percent the European and Asian Pacific markets.
• In North America, however, the IM market is more competitive, with MSN Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger, and Yahoo! Messenger each controlling roughly one-third of the market.
• Although it has yet to gain a large share of the user base in North America, Skype is used by 14 percent of IM users worldwide, including 26 percent of Asia Pacific IM users.79

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