Registered Users
Registered Users are all the people who have ever created an account with a service. The number can almost only go up, which is why it says very little about how many people actually use the service.
Anyone who wants to use an app or a website often has to create an account there first. You enter an email address and a password and get your own access in return. Every person who has done this once counts for the company as a Registered User. This English term appears in almost all business reports, because these reports are read internationally. One detail matters here: what is counted is the creation of the account, not its use. Anyone who signed up once in 2019 and never opened the app again is still included in this number today.
Why the number tends to look too big
Registered Users is the most flattering of all user figures. It can almost only rise, because accounts are rarely deleted. A service can therefore report growth year after year even though fewer people are actually showing up every day. That is exactly why this number so often appears right at the top of press releases.
Experts therefore always compare it with a second figure: active users. The common ones are Monthly Active Users, meaning people who have opened the service at least once within a month, and Daily Active Users for a single day. Only the ratio between the two numbers reveals anything. If a service has 100 million registered accounts but only 5 million active users per month, then it is practically empty.
For investors, this is crucial, because money is almost never earned from accounts. Advertising is only seen when someone opens the app. A subscription only generates revenue for as long as it is not cancelled. A high number of Registered Users without activity is therefore more of a warning sign than a success.
Everything that can go wrong when counting
An account is not the same as a person. Many people have two or three accounts with the same service, for example a private one and one for school. Others sign up again because they forgot their password. Every one of these sign-ups increases the count by one, even though no new person has joined.
On top of that, there are accounts that have no person behind them at all. Automatically created accounts run by programs, so-called bots, are a well-known problem on large platforms. Some companies regularly clean up their numbers and delete dead accounts. Then the user count suddenly drops, without a single real person having left.
To make matters more difficult, there is no legally fixed definition. Each company decides for itself what counts as a registration. An account that was never confirmed after sign-up counts for one company but not for another. Numbers from different providers can therefore only be compared to a limited extent.
The number in quarterly reports and AI news
Registered Users mainly appears in the quarterly reports of publicly listed companies, meaning the figures a company publishes every three months. Streaming services, social networks, online banks, and game providers almost always cite it. Start-ups also advertise it when they want to raise new money from investors.
In recent years, AI providers have joined in. A chatbot might then report about a hundred million registered accounts just a few months after launch. Such numbers sound spectacular but are easy to achieve: many people try out a new tool once and never come back. Anyone who wants to read the announcement correctly should look for the number of active or paying users in the same text.
As a rule of thumb: Registered Users describes how many people have ever found a product interesting. Active users describes how many still need it today. If the second number is missing from a press release, that is often no coincidence.