Zoom Lied About Having 300 Million Users, By Editing Its Original Announcement

Zoom lie

It was back in April 22 that Zoom claimed its video-conferencing app had "more than 300 million people around the world are using Zoom during this challenging time."

Boasting that figure sent investors and users happy, but competition worried. The announcement was reported in a number of news, and skyrocketed Zoom's stock to a height never before reached by the 9-year-old company.

But later, things got kind of sneaky. At some point since the blog post was first published, Zoom edited it to say that the app had "300 million daily meeting participants." This posed a huge question, considering that the difference between a daily active user (DAU) and “meeting participant” is significant.

For example, daily meeting participants can be counted multiple times. So if a user has five Zoom meetings in one day then the person is counted five times for that day. On the other hand, DAU is only counted once. So if the user had five Zoom meetings in one day, that person is still counted as 1 DAU.

In other words, Zoom in saying "meeting participants" is an easy way to make its platform larger that it is, but somewhat misleading because the number of "participants" have never been the standard metrics for counting users.

After The Verge reached out to Zoom, the company added a note to the said blog post, admitting the error it made, and provided the following statement:

"We are humbled and proud to help over 300 million daily meeting participants stay connected during this pandemic. In a blog post on April 22, we unintentionally referred to these participants as 'users' and 'people'. When we realized this error, we adjusted the wording to 'participants'. This was a genuine oversight on our part."

Zoom’s growth has been impressive, but regardless of that, the company has not actually provided a DAU count, the standard metric in counting users.

While this so-called "error" didn't really hurt anyone, the distinction between the two is important because it can give more clarity on how high Zoom really got amid the remote working due to the novel 'COVID-19' coronavirus. This created confusion to the press.

With the update, people now know that Zoom wants to use "participants" as its metric. All good what that, as now people should be able to gauge Zoom better, by knowing that the real number of users isn't as high as expected. But this creates another confusion.

Especially among analysts and competitors, Zoom in focusing on meeting participants rather DAUs makes it more difficult to calculate how the company is doing against rivals

Zoom app

Zoom went from a niche enterprise video-conferencing tool, to become a vital tool for personal and professional socialization at a time when people are staying at home during the coronavirus pandemic.

Because of that, its usage has increased from 10 million daily "meeting participants" back in December 2019 to 300 million this April.

Rivals like Microsoft Teams and Google Meet are closing the gap. Using the standard metric DAU, Microsoft said that it has 75 million daily active users of Teams, a jump from 70% in a month. Microsoft recorded 200 million meeting participants in a single day.

As for Google, its Meet app added roughly 3 million new users each day, and reached a new height of over 100 million daily Meet meeting participants.

Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and others, including Cisco with Webex, are still competing with Zoom, as they all reach new heights.

Zoom has faced a series of privacy and security issues as its usage grew, including the phenomenon of "Zoombombing" and the "Zoom fatigue".

After Zoom admitted the "error", its shares instantly dropped by more than 5.5%.

Published: 
01/05/2020