The company was totaling up ‘participants’ in each Zoom meeting, meaning repeat users were counted multiple times in a single day. ‘This was a genuine oversight on our part,’ Zoom says.<\/b>
\n(Photo by Yuriko Nakao\/Getty Images)
Zoom doesn\u2019t actually have over 300 million daily users, as the company stated last week. That count includes repeat users, who may be using the service multiple times in a single day.
On Wednesday, the video conferencing provider quietly made the clarification, which was noticed by The Verge. The April 22 blog post from Zoom that originally mentioned the company surpassing \u201c300M daily users,\u201d has now been changed to say \u201c300M daily meeting participants.\u201d
The revision seems subtle, but it actually means Zoom isn\u2019t counting for unique users. Instead, the company is merely totaling up the \u201cparticipants\u201d in each Zoom meeting. So if you have three Zoom meetings in a single day, the company can count you three times, even though you\u2019re one individual user.
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\u201cIn a blog post on April 22, we unintentionally referred to these participants as \u2018users\u2019 and \u2018people.\u2019 When we realized this error, we adjusted the wording to \u2018participants.\u2019 This was a genuine oversight on our part,\u201d the company told PCMag.
Zoom also used the same metric back on April 1, when the company mentioned it had \u201c200 million daily meeting participants.\u201d However, the actual unique user count remains unclear. The company declined to reveal the exact figure.
Nevertheless, the daily meeting participant metric still shows that Zoom has skyrocketed in popularity since the COVID-19 pandemic began. In December, the daily meeting participant count for the product was at a mere 10 million.
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However, other video conferencing products are catching up in popularity. Microsoft Teams was also able to attract 200 million daily meeting participants in a single day this month, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in an earnings call on Wednesday. \u201cTeams now has more than 75 million daily active users,\u201d he added.
Google Meet, on the other hand, has been able to draw 100 million daily meeting participants, with peak daily usage up 30 times since January. The product is also now free for everyone.
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