Key Windows Live Messenger Statistics

[HappyAndyK]

- The average length of a Messenger session (a conversation) is 9-11 minutes

- About 59% of sessions are over 5 minutes, with about 10% over 20 minutes long

- 1.6 billion sessions per month are over 30 minutes long

- People use Messenger to exchange over 380 million photos a month —over 4.5 billion photos a year (this is in addition to the tens of billions of photos people also share each month via Windows Live SkyDrive and Hotmail)

- Messenger users have 230 million voice & video conversations per month

- Average voice session length is about 18.2 minutes

- Average video session length is about 13.3 minutes
9% of video calls and 13% of voice calls are longer than 1 hour

- Usage of international voice and video sessions differ geographically. Brazilians use voice & video only 13% of the time for international connections while users in other countries, such as Spain or Germany, use voice and video 50-75% of the time for long distance chats with friends and family

More at Engineering Messenger for real relationships - Inside Windows Live - The Windows Blog

[MrMBerman]

Astonishing numbers, would be really interesting to know how these compare over the same period last year are they up or down as more of us use other media such as facebook and twitter to communicate and share.

I personally have replaced live messenger with skype for chat and video calling as the a/v experience seems to be so much better.