Viber: 50 Million Users, 150 Million Calls And Nearly A Billion Text Messages Per Month

By Robin Wouters at TechCrunch:
Viber, the smartphone app that lets people call and text other users free of charge, has recently surpassed 50 million registered users.
Yes, but how many of them are active users, you ask, critically?
Well, the Israeli startup behind the apps won’t say, but provides some fairly impressive usage stats to back up the fact that people aren’t just signing up never to fire up its applications ever again.
Users are currently making over a billion minutes worth of calls every month, Viber claims, and sending nearly a billion text messages in the same timespan. You know a company is onto something when they start measuring certain KPIs in billions and not millions.
Viber says its iPhone and Android apps are being used by people in 193 countries, who collectively make about 150 million calls on a monthly basis. Over 20 million photo messages are exchanged per month, too.
You’ll note that this means that Viber users are only making 3 calls per month, on average, which suggests that not all 50 million users are as active – or maybe free texting is the killer feature here.
The impressive thing about these milestones is that Viber has done it in just over year after its initial debut, and is still showing remarkable growth with over 200,000 new signs-ups per day. And that they’ve achieved this feat whilst challenging the likes of Skype, Vonage, Jajah, Rebtel, Nimbuzz, fring, eBuddy, Truphone and others in the mobile communication and VoIP space.