What exactly does 10M users mean?

veidr · on July 25, 2017

Well, I'm guessing probably doesn't mean "ten million" in this particular case.

"M" is one of those fundamentally ambiguous type of abbreviations that really shouldn't ever be used. (Kind of like nn/nn/nn date formats.)

It is commonly used to mean both "thousand" (M was the Roman numeral for 1000) and "million" (10K, 10M, 10B).

andrewstuart · on July 25, 2017

>> Well, I'm guessing probably doesn't mean "ten million" in this particular case.

Why not? 10M seems the obvious.

kornish · on July 25, 2017

10 million seems like the clear interpretation here. What's more, 10,000 is X in Roman numerals.

I think andrewstuart was asking what qualified as a "user": how many were active, how much they engaged, etc.

veidr · on July 26, 2017

Yeah, I didn't think they were literally using Roman numerals to describe their user base; I thought they were using the "10M == 10,000, 10MM == 10,000,000" notation that is (for some reason) popular with financial-type people[1].

But anyway, I was wrong; I poked around on the site and they indicate they really do have millions of users. So: wow, nice work!

[1]: https://www.accountingcoach.com/blog/what-does-m-and-mm-stan...