14 DAY TRIAL // Many have been saying there is no money to be made from instant messaging but Meebo may beg to differ as the company has been seeing massive growth in user numbers and in revenue lately. The site, which allows users to connect to a variety of IM services and also has tools for other sites to integrate chat functionality, has seen a huge bump in user numbers after the introduction of the Community IM partner program. And the rise in users is paralleled by a rise in revenue, according to TechCrunch.
Meebo has been around for a few years now but has only recently started generating revenue. The site started out as a web-based method of accessing IM services, one way of getting around restrictions at the workplace or chatting from different computers. It quickly gathered quite a following but revenue didn't start to roll in until the site introduced ads to the service.
Recently the company introduced a major upgrade to its Community IM product, which allows third-party sites to implement chat functionality without too much hassle. Initially the feature only allowed users to chat with the ones on the same site but the new version introduced a few months back enables them to chat with everyone using the service or any of the IM services Meebo currently supports. The product has become rather popular with partners leading to a huge spike in traffic for the past few months, almost doubling from August when the site got 50 million visitors to 90 million at the start of October.
The huge growth is important as, a short while after the update, Meebo introduced ads to Community IM as well ads that now get a lot of views and a surprising number of clicks with a click rate of over 1 percent. Of course the 90 million visitors it counts don't necessarily mean actual users as all the visitors to the partner sites are added to the number regardless of whether they use the chat feature or not. Still, they all get to see the ads and that's what matters to the bottom line and the company is reporting a huge increase in revenue as well with an expected 10-fold increase this year though Meebo hasn't disclosed actual numbers.