50 Top Discord Statistics: Revenue, Users, Servers (2023)
Are you familiar with Discord? It was originally released in 2015, and since, it has grown into a phenomenon with more than 140 million active users.
Discord is a communications platform that allows users to send written messages, talk in real-time, share video, and even share their screens. It was originally designed and marketed to the gaming community as a way to talk while playing games. It has since evolved, and it is now a global leader in overall online communication.
What separates Discord from other platforms is the ability for users to create servers. Whereas an app like Zoom allows you to create a temporary virtual meeting space, Discord servers are persistent. Create a server, invite people to join, and anyone can write messages, talk, and share information freely forever. The server doesn’t go away unless you delete it.
Considering the novelty and success of Discord, it’s not surprising that the platform has generated some eye-popping statistics over its short life. Let’s look at some of those statistics and learn more about Discord and just what it means in the world of digital communications.
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Contents
Top 10 Discord Statistics (Editor's Picks)
More than 140 million people use Discord each month, and that usage is active, as they tend to interact with the app on a daily and weekly basis.
75 percent of users utilize Discord for communication that has nothing to do with gaming or playing games.
Discord users create more than 4 billion minutes of voice conversation every single day.
Discord is currently valued at $15 billion, making it another among many tech giants.
Discord generated roughly $300 million in revenue in 2021, and virtually all of it came from the optional Nitro subscription service.
There are more than 13.5 million active servers right now, and the number of active and inactive servers is constantly fluctuating.
25 percent of Discord traffic is inside of the United States
There are more than 400,000 unique bots on Discord, and the most prolific of them is active on millions of servers.
Discord grew from $10 million in revenue in 2017 to the projected $300 million in 2021, representing a 30-fold increase in 4 years.
Each Discord server can support up to 199,999 bots.
Discord Usage
How Many People Use Discord?
Discord usage has increased dramatically in the years since the platform launched. In 2016, there were roughly 10 million monthly active users (MAUs). By 2018, that number had grown to over 45 million, and in 2020, it exceeded 100 million.
Today, Discord has more than 140 million MAUs, making it an extremely popular communications platform. To put that in perspective, Zoom has about 300 million MAUs, and a social media site like Facebook has almost 3 billion.
While MAUs make for a good bit of context, a few other statistics further show how many people use Discord. For instance, there are currently more than 300 million registered accounts. While not all accounts are used every month, this shows that more than 30 percent of Discord users are active on a monthly basis.
How Much Do People Use Discord?
Discord sees a large amount of use, but not necessarily in terms of time spent on the app each day. The average user spends around nine minutes a day actively using Discord.
That said, the app features passive listening, so a person can communicate via Discord throughout the day without spending much time on the app.
Put in other terms, the average Discord user spends around 280 minutes on the app each month. In most cases, users spend larger amounts of time on the app in single sessions. As an example, it’s common for users to have one long conversation across the week and very little interaction with Discord on other days.
Since Discord enables voice and text communications, it’s easy to see that both take up a significant portion of user interaction. Discord sees over 800 million written messages each day alongside more than 4 billion minutes of conversation.
In all, people use Discord in a variety of ways for a variety of durations, but when compared to other apps, Discord is not in the highest echelon in terms of user statistics.
How Does Discord Communication Work?
Each Discord server is managed independently from the rest, so the format and communication rules can change. Overall, there is a general format to everything. There is a general chat where new users land when they join the server, and generally, every user can participate in that written chat.
Servers can set up voice channels that people can join whenever they want. These are like permanent voice conferences, making it very easy to start up voice communications at any time, 24/7.
Voice channels can also enable screen sharing, where users can show others what is on the screen of their device. This can be used to share video game gameplay, but it can show literally anything on a screen, making it a diverse option.
Ultimately, voice communications are the most popular of these three, but all are used at a large scale, according to the statistics you saw in the previous sections.
Sources: Matthew Woodward, Zippia, Cloud Wards
Discord Revenue
How Much Money Does Discord Make?
Before we get into the financial statistics, let’s remember one thing. Discord is completely free to use.
Discord is a multinational company with activity on multiple continents. While it started as a modest endeavor, the app generated roughly $10 million in revenue in 2017.
By just 2020, that number had grown to over $130 million in total revenue, representing more than a 10-fold increase in 3 years. Growth has continued to be good, and Discord revenue is estimated to have breached $300 million in 2021. 2022 revenue data has not yet been released.
Discord makes the vast majority of its money through a subscription service called Nitro. Nitro gives users access to advanced features, and it starts at $2.99 per month. With Nitro Basic, users get extra upload privileges, custom emojis, and a Nitro badge.
Nitro (without the “basic” modifier) is the upgraded subscription tier. With this, users get 10 times the upload privileges, access to HD video streaming, specialized activities, and server boosts. There are other benefits backed into the subscription bundle.
Discord has not disclosed the exact number of Nitro users, but if 90 percent of Discord revenue came from Nitro (this is an estimate), then it would require a minimum of 1 million monthly subscribers to hit that number.
How Much Is Discord Worth?
Discord has rapidly growing revenue statistics, and as a result, the company’s net worth has grown rapidly over the years too. It was founded with roughly $10 million in seed money. As of 2021, the estimated value of Discord is $15 billion. That represents a 150-fold growth in value since the company’s inception.
Additionally, Discord has done multiple fundraising campaigns, and throughout those campaigns, it has raised more than $1 billion in total funds, adding to the company’s estimated net worth.
What Are Discord’s Financial Projections?
In 2022, Discord ran a fundraising campaign that generated more than $500 million in new funds. While the intentions for these funds are varied and diverse, the general idea is that Discord is trying to expand server capacity so that it can continue to offer more and more services to users.
At the same time, Discord has notoriously turned down several buyout offers. The most famous of those offers came when Microsoft offered $10 billion for a complete buyout.
Despite all of this, Discord’s valuation fell in 2022 (along with virtually every tech business). Current projections have taken Discord from a valuation of $15 billion down to just over $10 billion, and the expectation is that things will not dramatically improve in 2023. Even though revenue is expected to grow, and the company’s recent fundraising has guaranteed solvency, the general consensus is that tech companies are not going to rebound quickly from 2022 losses.
Sources: Business of Apps, Cloudwards, TechCrunch, CNBC
Discord Servers
How Many Discord Servers Are There?
The entire premise of Discord is that any user can create their own server for their own personalized use. As a result, Discord hosts very large numbers of servers used for endless numbers of purposes.
Currently, Discord maintains more than 13.5 million active virtual servers, and many of them are not gaming related. In fact, a recent poll showed that almost 75 percent of Discord users primarily use it for non-gaming communication. This represents a dramatic turn, considering Discord launched in 2015 as a communications platform for gaming.
How Much Use Do Discord Servers Get?
While Discord maintains millions of active servers, not all servers see the most activity. Here are some of the most popular Discord servers:
Fortnite: currently with more than 815,000 members
Minecraft: currently with more than 800,000 members
Mr. Beast Gaming: also with more than 800,000 members
While some servers have numbers approaching a million users, that is not the norm. The average server has fewer than 15 users, and the average user is in multiple servers. As a result, server numbers are constantly fluctuating.
How Are Discord Servers Used?
Since 75 percent of Discord use has nothing to do with gaming, what do Discord servers look like? How are they used?
With 10s of millions of servers, there are too many varieties to list, but one common usage is for common interest groups that aren’t centered around gaming. As an example, you can find countless examples of hobby groups such as movie groups, TV show groups, trading card servers, and more.
Another common use for servers is personal branding. Famous streamers and social media stars almost all have their own personal Discord channels that they can run and moderate as they see fit. Discord servers are considered great for engagement and personal branding.
There are also professional Discord servers. Remote-work businesses can use Discord servers to centralize communication. You will even find investing servers that bring people together to discuss things like WallStreet Bets and cryptocurrency.
Gaming is still the most popular single topic for Discord servers, but that likely won’t hold true for too much longer.
Sources: ThinkImpact, Business of Apps, Make Tech Easier
Discord Messaging
How Many Messages Are Sent on Discord?
As you read earlier, Discord sees more than 850 million messages sent each day. That adds up to more than 6 billion new messages every week. Discord is processing almost one message per person on the planet, every single week.
Continuing the math, this number reaches 25 billion messages each month, demonstrating that Discord servers are very active, even if daily usage times are not extremely high. In order for 13.5 million active servers to handle 25 billion messages in a month, the average Discord server has to process more than 1800 messages every month.
How Much Conversation Is Made With Discord?
Outside of written messaging, Discord sees the majority of its communication in the form of video and voice conferencing. Users can talk with each other directly, in direct calls and in voice conferences via servers. Across these messages, Discord handles roughly 4 billion minutes of conversation each day.
Compare this to the 6 billion written messages per week, and it highlights that the majority of Discord usage involves real-time, voice communication.
Users can also share screens and video information while conversing. Discord has not released video processing statistics, but they likely rival those of conversation, suggesting that Discord is processing millions, if not billions, of minutes of video each day as well.
As large as these numbers are, comparing them to the biggest companies in the business of video adds perspective. YouTube users watch 1 billion hours of video each day.
Sources: ThinkImpact, Cloudwards, Business of Apps, Comparitech
Discord Bots
How Many Discord Bots Are There?
Discord has an interesting secondary marketplace where it fosters the creation and deployment of chat-related bots. Bots on Discord carry out all kinds of tasks. They can help moderate conversations to prevent certain types of discussions. They can be used to play music in a server so that all users can listen to the same music at the same time.
Bots can organize conversations, track statistics, and a whole lot more.
As a result, bots are a big part of the Discord ecosystem, and there are a lot of bots in play. Currently, there are more than 400,000 bots in use in Discord every single week. Any server can have multiple bots, with a maximum hosting capacity of 199,999 bots per server. Similarly, bots can be in multiple servers, with the most popular bots participating in millions of servers at the same time.
As anyone can develop and deploy a bot if they so choose, the number of bots on Discord is expected to continue to grow.
How Much Use Do Bots Get?
To put bot usage into perspective, a few statistics on bot popularity and deployment can expand the idea.
As an example, Rhythm was a popular bot that allowed users to listen to music together. It was the first bot to be used in more than 1 million servers, until Google ultimately took the bot down.
Mee6 is currently the most popular bot on discord. It is deployed in more than 19 million servers, making it prolific beyond measure. This is especially true if you remember that Discord currently supports fewer than 19 million active servers. It shows that Meee6 is present in many discontinued and inactive servers as well. It also highlights that there are many inactive servers on Discord.
While it’s not uncommon for a server to see bot usage, the average server has fewer than 20 bots.
Sources: The Verge, Streamers Playbook, Mee6, Top.gg
Conclusion
Discord is clearly a successful communications platform. With so many users, rapidly growing revenue, a strong multi-billion-dollar valuation, and very positive interactions, it’s likely to stick around for a while and continue to grow over the next few years.
Considering how much communication Discord can handle, its growth potential, and the fact that the majority of users have already moved away from its gaming origins, it would not be surprising to see the platform carve out a larger market share and eclipse direct competitors, like Zoom.
Regardless, Discord will continue to see large-scale, constant use from its existing base, and it will remain a reliable means of communication for hundreds of millions of people.