The Great Migration from Registered Users to Monthly Active Users

Who cares how many users you have if they aren't active? There's a trend taking place lately - it is a shift from talking about registered users and downloads to speaking about monthly active. It is a shift from size to engagement. From bragging rights to essence. The first time I bumped into this is when I started following the VoIP OTT space a lot closer. I took a look at the players and the numbers they were reporting. Here's a quick exercise for you - who's the bigger player?

The thing is, we're not comparing the same numbers - some of these players count registered users while others count Monthly Active Users. For those that report only registered users, I've estimated a 1:2.5 ratio and marked the estimations with green bars. I got the following graph:

Who's the bigger player now? At Google I/O, Google started talking about MAU. Monthly Active Users. They have switched from the number of downloads they have for things and the number of activations for Android and instead talked about monthly active. Why? Because these numbers are now really impressive. Android is at a billion active devices on the Google Play Store and the mobile version of Chrome has 300 monthly active users on mobile. - We are shifting from bragging rights of scaling our database to large number of users to bragging rights of scaling our actual service and engagement (=communication infrastructure). What are you counting in your service?