Zoom Quietly Admits it Does Not Have 300 Million Daily Active Users

The Zoom video conferencing app does not have 300 million daily active users, the company admitted on Thursday.

Zoom is backtracking on an announcement last week that its videoconferencing app had racked up 300 million daily users. Instead, the company now says it has “300 million daily meeting participants,” a different metric that counts people for every Zoom meeting they attend in a day.

These numbers were quoted by numerous media outlets, but, as noticed by The Verge, the company has since changed the wording in the blog post from “daily users” to “daily meeting participants.”

“We are humbled and proud to help over 300 million daily meeting participants stay connected during this pandemic,” said a Zoom spokesperson in an emailed statement on Thursday. “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.”

There is a significant difference between a daily active user (DAU) and “meeting participant.” The former is counted once each day, being the industry’s commonly used statistic in measuring service usage. However, daily meeting participants can be counted more than once. For example, if you attend several meetings in a day, you’ll be counted each time. Thus, counting meeting participants can somehow be a misleading claim, as it usually makes your platform consumption seem bigger than it actually is.

The use of Zoom has soared with corporate offices, political parties, school districts, organizations and millions across the world working from home after lockdowns were enforced to slow the spread of the coronavirus.

The erroneous daily user numbers came from CEO Eric Yuan’s update on Zoom’s 90-day security plan. Last month, Yuan said the company would stop adding new features to Zoom so it can devote its resources to addressing issues like “Zoombombing,” when uninvited attendees enter your meeting.

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