Zoom misled world with 300-million users claim, corrects ‘oversight’

New Delhi, April 30 (IANS) In a startling revelation, popular video meet app has meekly admitted it does not have over 300 million daily active users (DAUs) but these are actually the numbers of meeting participants.

In a recent blog post, Zoom declared it more than 300 million DAUs users “around the world are using Zoom during this challenging time”.

The California-based company later deleted these references from the original blog post, claiming “300 million daily Zoom meeting participants”.

First caught by The Verge, Zoom has admitted the mistake and posted it on the original blog post.

“This blog originally referred to meeting participants as ‘users’ and ‘people.’ This was an oversight on our part. The blog also correctly used the term participants, but not consistently. The oversight was corrected,” said the company.

Daily meeting participants can be counted multiple times during the video meet call but a DAU is counted once per day, and is used by companies to measure service usage.

“Only counting meeting participants is an easy, somewhat misleading, way to make your platform usage seem larger than it is,” said the report.

Zoom said “this was a genuine oversight on our part”.

In December, Zoom had 10 million daily meeting participants which soared in COVID-19 lockdowns and social distancing times as millions of people stay home.

Other video conferencing apps are fast closing the gap with Zoom.

Inspired by the growing use of its video conferencing app Meet – 30 lakh new users joining the platform daily – Google on Wednesday announced to make its premium video meeting app free for everyone in social distancing times.

Google Meet is currently hosting 3 billion minutes of video meetings and adding roughly 3 million new users every day.

Microsoft’s enterprise communication tool Teams now has more than 75 million daily active users and number of organisations integrating their third-party and line of business apps with Teams has tripled in the past 2 months.

Microsoft saw more than 200 million meeting participants in a single day this month, generating more than 4.1 billion meeting minutes.

–IANS

na/