Since its launch in January, IG has signed up 2.1 million users, almost doubling the number of Internet accounts in Brazil to about 4 million.
Brazil alone accounts for about half of all the users in Latin America.
However, it is difficult to accurately gauge the ISP market in Brazil because an estimated 25 to 50 percent of reported free accounts are duplicate accounts for the same subscriber. Since the launch of IG, which at its height was signing up one new subscriber every three seconds, analysts have been reviewing the business models of companies such as UOL, which derives 70 percent of its revenue from the fees it collects from its 670,000 Internet accounts. The companies also endured the scrutiny of market analysts suddenly skeptical of their potential to maintain growing revenues in the face of the new free contenders. UOL, which has an astounding billion page views per month, was set to go public early this year but was hit by the deteriorating market conditions and by the advent of the free-ISP model that forced it to postpone its IPO plans. But the free model was never without detractors.