Within two weeks of its beta launch, Baidu’s IM Hi already has one million users, but as the China Web2.0 Review notes:

The real challenge is how many percentage of registered users will remain active six month later.

The market here in the US is fairly flat even though there are services out there that allows people to connect across all of them, so it is really not an easy field to break into especially in an environment like this:

Based on the results of China IM Market Quarterly Tracker Q4 2007 by Analysys International, QQ accounts for about 78% market share among totally 390 million active IM accounts in China. MSN Live Messenger has about 19 million active users, accounting for 4.9% market shared, followed by Sina UC (4.1%), Fetion (3.7%) and Aliwangwang (3.1%). Leveraging Alibaba and Taobao’s B2B and C2C service, the No. of Aliwangwang’s active users keep increasing quickly. Its market share increased from 2.5% to 3.1% in last quarter of 2007, according to Analysys International’s tracker report.