It is official; Netcraft confirms: IRC is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered IRC community when IDC confirmed that IRC market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all IM protocols. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that IRC has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. IRC is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by deathward incline of this graph on
Netsplit.de comprehensive statistics page.
You don't need to be an IT guru to predict IRC's future. The hand writing is on the wall: IRC faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for IRC because IRC is dying. Things are looking very bad for IRC. As many of us are already aware, IRC continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
QuakeNet is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core operators. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time QuakeNet ops ~kiddo~ and d0n4t3plz only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: IRC is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Freenode operator christel states that there are 30000 users of freenode. How many users of Rizon are there? Let's see. The number of Freenode versus Rizon links on the Internet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 30000/5 = 6000 Rizon users. UniBG links on the Internet are about half of the volume of Rizon posts. Therefore there are about 3000 users of UniBG. A recent article put QuakeNet at about 80 percent of the IRC market. Therefore there are (30000+6000+3000)*4 = 156000 QuakeNet users. This is consistent with the number of QuakeNet links.
Due to the troubles of netsplits and abysmal female users percentage, QuakeNet went out of business and was taken over by DALnet who runs another troubled network. Now DALnet is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that IRC has steadily declined in market share. IRC is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If IRC is to survive at all it will be among IM dilettante dabblers. IRC continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, IRC is dead.
Fact: IRC is dying