Earlier this month, Zoom claimed that it had "more than 300 million daily users," as many have resorted to using video conferencing tools for work, education, and other purposes amidst the coronavirus crisis. The firm later quietly updated the original post, removing references to 300 million people/users, and now claims "300 million daily Zoom meeting participants" instead (Via The Verge).
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.
A day after the numbers were publicly revealed, the edit was made on April 24. When asked about the misleading claim, Zoom added a note to the blog post, admitting the error.
"Edit 4/29/20: This blog originally referred to meeting participants as “users” and “people.” This was an oversight on our part."
The firm is currently enacting a 90-day feature freeze to fix security and privacy vulnerabilities within the app. Eric Yuan, Zoom CEO, stated earlier this month that until the current feature set is fixed, the company won"t be rolling out any new features.