Where will IM go June 19th, 2008
© Jeff Sandquist
As of an October 2007 survey Yahoo had 25% of the IM market, AOL 22%, MSN 18%, and Google 5%. Within the mix there are various relationships where one service can communicate with another. Ultimately linking everyone together would seem the direction being taken. Especially with the announced partnership between Yahoo and Google messaging these last few days. But if you look deeper, the relationship was done to aid in future marketing of ads to the users.
IM services are there for us to get hooked on and buy products. Reportedly, there currently isn't much revenue from the use of IM. Why might this be? I venture to say that the visibility of advertisement is almost negligible. How much can you really put within a small IM client? I personally don't notice them during the use of my IM client. Analysts, and I tend to agree, that the true marketing will be for those IM services that push users back to a Web portal. This can only be done if there is a pact between all the IM service providers or else, I'm afraid, everyone will migrate to the service without advertisements.