Baron
ET Founder
Reasons why those services have that many users participating:
1). Chat is the only service they provide and therefore promote.
2). They were doing this during the dot com boom and got decent press coverage for it, which has helped stick those destinations in a lot of people's minds as far as chat is concerned.
2). They've been doing nothing but chat for over 5 years, which gives them a first mover advantage. However, come back to Elite Trader in 5 years and let's see how many people are in our room
Practically speaking though, it takes time to get a new service up a running. The reality is that people tend to gravitate to the destinations that have the most users, so just because you a launch a certain service doesn't mean anybody will use it. For example, if Financial Chat or daytraders.org starting doing a web-based message board like this one, odds are that hardly any of those 600 plus daily users in their chat room(s) would even use it, and it's even less likely that a frequent poster at Elite Trader would start using it.
We've only been doing real-time chat on a daily basis for about two months, so we've got a lot of work to do in this area. However, I am quite pleased at the progress so far. Two months ago, we had zero users. Now we have 35 - 40 in there during trading hours. If we can continue adding twenty users per month, that would be about 160 users by the end of the year, which would be great in my opinion.