I am a loyal user of Meebo. I never installed MSN Messenger on my Mac so use Meebo to connect to friends and colleagues from different computers and across Messenger and Google Talk. A couple of weeks ago Meebo received a handsome round of VC funding ($25 million) and so I thought it high time I share some stats on how the site is doing.
For those of you not familiar with Meebo, it is a web based instant messaging (IM) service that allows you to log in to all of your IM accounts and chat via their web interface. Last week (week to 10th May), Meebo ranked 13th among websites in the Social Networking and Forums category and 122 among All Categories of websites based on share of US Internet visits. The average session duration for the site was just over 9 minutes.
Meebo has enjoyed strong growth over the past year – with US Internet visits more than doubling year on year (+110%).
I compared Meebo’s growth and standing compared with the alternatives listed on Meebo Now (an unaffiliated information site about Meebo) and found that Meebo is indeed the biggest of the web based IM players. The second biggest player is MSN’s Web Messenger. Last week, Meebo attracted 19x more traffic than Web Messenger and Web Messenger’s visits have declined 56% in the past year compared to Meebo’s more than doubling.
Last week, Meebo received most of its traffic from social networks and search engines with MySpace the #1 source of visits. Websites in the Social Networking and Forums category accounted for 54% of upstream visits and Search Engines for 13%.
As many pundits pointed out when Meebo recently received their funding – traffic doesn’t equal revenue. The challenge for Meebo is to monetize this traffic.