Latin America moved to Telegram

For a week that has passed since the global Facebook infrastructure failure , Telegram had millions of new users. The Bell found out where the messenger Pavel Durov was most fortunate.

According to the APP Annie service, which tracks the download rating of mobile applications, in Brazil before the Facebook failure, Instagram and WhatsApp Telegram was approximately 300–380 in the Google Play store. On March 14, he climbed first place and lasted five days there. In the Brazilian App Store Telegram, he kept the first line for three days-he flew there from the 110-190s of the lines.
About the same leap - immediately 200 lines - Telegram made in Panama .
With their downloads, the paragraphs brought the messenger to fifth in their Google Play.
In the stores of applications of almost all Latin America countries , including Mexico , Telegram rose a few dozen lines. The messenger, even well -working in the conditions of blocking, has become an alternative to WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.

Quote: “I see 3 million new users who have joined Telegram over the past 24 hours. Fine. We have real privacy and unlimited space for everyone, ” wrote Durov the very next day after the failure in his telegram channel.

Causes and consequences

The failure of the entire Facebook infrastructure turned out to be a rare gift for Telegram: Latin America and India were primarily affected. These are the regions where the first selection messenger was WhatsApp, and the second - Facebook Messenger. When they both began to work with failures, users massively began to look for a replacement. And found.
March 14 was the most successful day for Telegram. But if we assume that all 3-5 days were as successful, we can reasonably assume that the failure brought Telegram to 10-15 million users . This is comparable to the entire Telegram audience in Russia (from 9 to 12 million, according to Mediascope, depending on the month of 2018).
Regardless of how many Brazilians (120 million Interneters) will continue to use Telegram, now many of them not only know about the alternative, but also downloaded it to their phone as a “second” messenger.

For Durov, this is a significant improvement in the quality of the audience: in Iran - only here Telegram was the main messenger - his audience was about 50 million users per month.

Where else do Telegram users live?

In February 2018, Similarweb analysts presented a map of the use of messengers in the world. The whole world is mainly used by WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.

The most popular messengers in the world, data from Similarweb

The map of the second most popular messengers is much more interesting. This is a map of the places for which the Durov messenger makes sense to compete - for example, in Uzbekistan Telegram reached second place, and in Russia and a number of other countries in second place is not yet dynamically developing Viber.

The second most popular messenger, December 2017, Android. SimilarWeb data

A little more than a year ago, Pavel Durov wrote that daily Telegram downloads over half a million Android users and about 100 thousand iOS users.

How many users do Telegram have?

Telegram infrequently shares data on the number of users. The last time the messenger reported that his monthly audience (MAU) reached 200 million users in March 2018. According to the plan described in Whitepaper for investors, in 2019 the MAU Messenger was supposed to reach 300 million users. This is five times less than whatsApp now, and four times less than Facebook Messenger.

Telegram plan, illustration from Whitepaper for investors

Latin America moved to Telegram

Causes and consequences

Where else do Telegram users live?

How many users do Telegram have?

Other problems