PayPal has hit 100 million active users. The company confirmed the milestone today. Last week, the company announced that it was upping estimates of the amount of mobile payments transactions using the technology this year; doubling the estimate to $3 billion in mobile total payments volume (TPV) in 2011.
At the end of last year, PayPal, which is owned by eBay, had around 94.4 million active users, and has been adding approximately one million active accounts per month. It's unclear, however, what PayPal considers as an 'active user.'
PayPal now represents 39 percent of eBay's total revenue, and nearly made $1 billion in revenue for the company in the first quarter of 2011, up 23 percent from the same quarter in the previous year...
Note the figures on that counter. Likely that was total accounts, both active and inactive. That was going in realtime. The screencap is part of a video screen recording for a more comprehensive project.
Clearly Paypal likes to spin the numbers and bloviate, in whichever way suits them at the moment.
My research shows that upwards of 77% (and climbing) of accounts are inactive. (more on that later)
Also that even PP employees state that as many as 74% of accounts are made with fake IDs.
In addition, there has been a cottage industry springing up in the 'cultivation' of fake accounts for resale.
People have been arrested and caught with dozens, even hundreds each of fake accounts.
100 million accounts may sound good for the crooked or naïve shareholders and merchant-clients/prospective clients, but the PP spin-pap is not to be believed.
It seems that Paypal active membership numbers must have dropped by over 5 million since this 100 million member PR nonsense came out. Fresh screencap just as I went to PP site.