OREANDA-NEWS. In August 2019, WhatsApp accounted for 39% of all instant messengers in Russian social networks; it became the most popular instant messenger for the first time in almost three years, according to a study by Brand Analytics. The number of messages about all instant messengers was 16.4 million. In February 2017, when BA began to measure the interest of Russians in instant messengers, there were two and a half times less - 6.6 million.

The three leaders by the number of references look like this:

  1. WhatsApp - 39%
  2. Viber - 28%
  3. Telegram - 21%
Brand Analytics believes that the growing popularity of WhatsApp is due to consumer-oriented group chats. “Who doesn’t have a school parental committee chat on the phone, country or drive chat, etc.? Most likely, you have several of them”, the authors of the study noted. Innovations like the broadcast only function, which allows you to transform chats into an analogue of public channels, haven't greatly affected the popularity of WhatsApp yet.

Experts noted that the percentage of mentions of SMS was 6% (in March 2018 it was 10%), and Skype received 4%. “Messengers located below the third line of the rating did not surprise us this year”, stated Brand Analytics. The authors of the study consider Discord an exception, which they called the most popular text and voice chat for gamers. “In 2018, the mention of this dark horse was at the level of error. And in August 2019, he received 2% of all messages in our study”, they write in Brand Analytics and note that the messenger achieved such results without media channels and additional functionality, due to which the popularity of rating leaders is growing.

The remaining participants collectively collected less than 1% of the messages, their list included ICQ, Facebook Messenger, iMessage, VK Messenger, Snapchat and WeChat.