Yahoo Mail And IM Users Update Their Status 800 Million Times A Month

At today’s Yahoo analyst event, Yahoo exec Bryan Lamkin shed some light on the company’s recent status update numbers. Yahoo launched its “status-casting” feature a few months ago, which added basic status updates to its Mail and Messenger products. In both Yahoo Mail and Messenger 10, you can update your status and all of your contacts who also use either of those two products can see your updates.

Today, Lamkin says that Yahoo is seeing 800 million status message updates per month through this new feature. AIM has been doing this for sometime now, so Yahoo’s status update feature isn’t new but the quantity of updates is certainly something worth noting. The integration of these status updates into mail and IM represents the merging of private and public messaging.

Lamkin also mentioned a few other noteworthy stats, some of which have been reported before. Yahoo mail alone drives 100 billion messages a month while Flickr users have uploaded more than 4 billion photos, growing at a rate of 100 million per month a month. Of those 4 billion photos, 130 million have been geotagged. Lamkin says that “Yahoo Mail delivers more photos in a week via the inbox than those that get uploaded to Facebook in one month.”

Yahoo Answers sees 30 million questions and answers per month, with users contributing 2.4 questions and answers per second. And there are currently 120 million members in Yahoo Groups across 10 million defined groups and activities. Plus, there are 15 billion messages sent every month across Yahoo Groups, showing the platform to be a place for massive communications.

While these numbers are certainly impressive, many of the status updates and photos are still locked inside Yahoo Mail. All of those photos, for instance are being shared on a one-to-one basis instead of a one-to-many, as is the case with other social media platforms. But the status updates are certainly an important new stream of data for Yahoo.