Remember ICQ messenger? Mail.ru aims to bring it back to glory

If you were online at the turn of the millennium, there’s a good chance you’re an ex-user of ICQ.

At the messenger’s peak around 2001, it had 100 million users. Now, on it’s 20th birthday, it’s down to 11 million. But Mail.ru Group – Russia’s largest Internet company –  thinks it can change that.

When it bought ICQ from AOL in 2010, it was still the number one messaging app in Russia. However, it was clear that ICQ was failing to adapt to mobile and was quickly losing market share to fast rising apps, said Igor Yermakov, head of instant messaging at Mail.ru. Competitors that overtook it included Skype (bought by Microsoft for $8.5 billion in 2011), WhatsApp (bought by Facebook for $19 billion in 2014) and Viber (bought by Rakuten for $900 million in 2014).