ICQ gives up positions

The monthly audience of the ICQ messenger decreased by more than 30% both in Russia and around the world. This has become the most noticeable loss of the service of its users over the past few years, follows from the financial report of Mail.ru Group for the first half of 2012.

According to the internal data of Mail.ru Group, the world monthly ICQ audience in June 2012 amounted to 20.5 million people, and a year earlier a similar indicator was 30.8 million users. A similar situation is observed in the Russian market - a fall from 15.6 million to 10.8 million people.

According to the company, the world monthly ICQ audience in June 2009 was 47.3 million users. Thus, over three years, the number of users around the world has decreased by 56.6%.

Over the past few years, traditional messengers have experienced increasing competition from the current popularity of social networks that have built -in instant messengers. In addition, the Skype Internet telephony service and Gmail, owned by Google provide similar functionality.

The Digital Sky Technologies Foundation (now Mail.ru Group) bought an ICQ service from the American AOL in July 2010 for 187.5 million dollars. AOL acquired ICQ from the Israeli company Mirabilis in 1998, paying about $ 400 million.