- Character.ai hits 4.2 million monthly active users in the U.S., closing in on ChatGPT's 6 million.
- The app is particularly popular among the 18-24 age group, with 60% of its user base falling in this demographic.
- Despite some dips, ChatGPT's traffic is showing signs of recovery as the school year starts.
September 12, 2023: Character.ai, an app that lets you design your own AI characters, is becoming almost as popular as ChatGPT in the United States. A report by market research firm Similarweb shows that Character.ai has reached 4.2 million monthly active users in the U.S. ChatGPT still leads with nearly 6 million users, but the gap is closing.
The success of Character.ai is new. It launched in May 2023 and got 1.7 million downloads in just one week. But getting downloads isn’t the same as having active users. Many apps lose people after a month.
Data from Appsflyer, a mobile marketing firm, says that most apps keep only 3-4% of users after one month. But Character.ai has been different. It has been able to keep some of its early fans and has been growing.
Although ChatGPT is still more popular on the internet, many people seem to prefer Character.ai on their phones.
And when we look at the whole world, ChatGPT still leads with 22.5 million users. Character.ai has just 5.27 million users globally.
Another interesting point is the age of the users. Character.ai seems to attract younger people.
Almost 60% of its users are between 18 and 24 years old. ChatGPT has fewer young users. Data shows that only 27% of its users are in this age group. And the number of young users has even gone down a bit.
Compared to other AI apps, Character.ai also does well with young people.
For example, other AI platforms like Perplexity.ai, Midjourney, Anthropic, and Bard have much lower numbers of young users. Their percentages are around 22-25%.
ChatGPT has seen some ups and downs lately. Similarweb data says that ChatGPT’s website visits fell by 3.2% to 1.43 billion in August.
People also spent less time on the site. But things are starting to get better. As schools have reopened, ChatGPT’s website visits have gone up a little in the U.S.
Character.ai has money to grow more. Earlier this year, they got $150 million in funding. This makes the company worth $1 billion. Investors believe in the team behind Character.ai. The founders, Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, are well-known AI experts.
They once led a team at Google that worked on LaMDA, a language model for chat apps. Sarah Wang from a16z, the firm that invested in Character.ai, called the founders “trailblazers in AI for nearly two decades.”
But the big question is, will young people keep using Character.ai? Or is it just a trend that will go away? We don’t know yet, and Character.ai didn’t comment when asked.
