Urban Airship Delivers 5 Billionth Mobile App Push Notification, Now Processing 13K Messages Per Minute

Mobile services startup Urban Airship has announced a major milestone today in delivering its 5 billionth mobile push notification — in just under 24 months.

The Portland, OR-based company was founded in September 2010 and quickly reached 1 billion notifications on behalf of thousands of app developers within 15 months of launching.  In the subsequent 11 months its push notification usage soared five-fold, delivering another 4 billion messages and alerts.  Urban Airship actually sent the first push notification for any app in the Apple App Store on June 14, 2009, and since then, usage of push notifications to drive app engagement has skyrocketed.

In a company press release, it was announced that Urban Airship is now delivering, on average,  520 million push notifications every month, 130 million per week, 19 million per day, and roughly 13 thousand messages per minute.  “I’m amazed at the growth we’ve seen in such a short time. Our team has delivered on the vision of a ubiquitous messaging layer for any connected device and we’re just getting warmed up over here,” says Scott Kveton, CEO of Urban Airship.  “The market is rapidly adopting push notifications as a critical communications channel, and it’s clear that mobile is changing everything.”

It took the company exactly 472 days (1 year, 3 months, 15 days) to hit the 1 billion notification mark, and to put that into perspective, it took Twitter 3 years, 2 months and 1 day to hit 1 billion tweets.  The market and demand for push notifications has been extraordinary over the past year, with nearly every high-profile mobile app incorporating push notifications to drive continued engagement and keep people coming back for more.  Several brands, including ESPN, Yahoo, Slate, msnbc.com, dictionary.com, Groupon and LivingSocial use Push to deliver ongoing content such as advertisements, deals and special sales, news stories, podcasts and playlists, weather and traffic alerts, transactional receipts and sports scores, for example.  If you use a smartphone, you’re likely receive at least one push notification per day.

Another major advantage to push notifications is the ability for app developers and brands to drive in-app purchases.  Urban Airship says its authenticated and enabled more than 4.2 million transactions to date.  The company hit the market at the right time and has become the predominate technology-provider to enable push.  To help with it’s accelerated growth, the company also announced the hiring of its first CFO, Dylan Anderson, who will will oversee strategic growth and help “drive capital needs as Urban Airship continues to make traction with significant larger-scale enterprise-scope partners.”

To celebrate it’s milestone, the company also put together an interesting infographic/timeline entitled the “Adventures of Urban Airship,” which we’ve embedded below: