Dropbox Boasts 500 Million Registered Users For Its Cloud Storage Service

Dropbox Boasts 500 Million Registered Users For Its Cloud Storage Service

Dropbox has announced that it has reached a new milestone with it now having 500 million registered users. The company announced 100 million users in November 2012, 200 million a year later, and from then on it sped up and added more than 200 million users in just 13 months. The last 100 million users, i.e. to reach half a billion milestone, were added in less than 9 months.

The company says the numbers behind the expansion are global with users from across the world. Specifically Dropbox stated, that most consumer signups over the past nine months were from Brazil, India, UK, Germany and USA. It adds, that the same trend was seen for business users as well. Dropbox is based in the US but its user base makes it a global company as 75 percent of the company’s users are from outside the US.

Dropbox also shared that the service has reached another record as 3.3 billion connections were established amongst users over this time period, a 51 percent increase over the previous year. 44 percent of the new accounts were registered thanks to referrals from existing users who introduced their friends, family and colleagues to the cloud storage service.

When Dropbox reached 400 million users, it boasted that there were 50 countries around the world with more than 1 million Dropbox users each and that they were syncing 1.2 billion files every day, creating over 100,000 shared folders every hour, making 4,000 edits per second and using Dropbox at more than 8 million businesses. Dropbox has more than 150,000 paying customers including business users. These stats, however, were not updated though.

It is impressive to see that Dropbox adoption has increased again. When it launched in 2008, it had a head start but the competition much tougher nowadays as rival services are offering much more space with encryption, and that too without any cost. Much of its competition comes from Mega, Google Drive, Box and Microsoft’s OneDrive. Mega offers the best features and most space while Microsoft and Google have integrated services with their cloud services and have very deep pockets.

Perhaps Dropbox’s strategy to partner with Microsoft across mobiles and web, experimentation with tools for Chrome, Windows and Mac without any partnerships has helped maintain user adoption even with such competition. In short, maybe it is just too mainstream and people like to use it. But there have been some questions regarding the company’s $10 billion valuation and it has failed to succeed with any new service other than file sharing. Dropbox definitely has a tough road ahead if it wants those registered users to regularly use the service.