Mega reaches 1M users a day after launching, Dotcom says

Despite launching little over a day ago, new cloud storage service Mega has seen 1 million users sign up, according to founder Kim Dotcom, who spoke at a Mega launch event at his home in New Zealand yesterday.

While Dotcom’s claim can’t necessarily be verified, it seems likely that Mega has gained a ton of users since its Saturday launch, especially since Mega is targeting the international community — not just the U.S. and/or Europe.

Mega is the successor to Dotcom’s Megaupload service, which was shut down last year over accusations by the U.S. government that it was facilitating piracy on a massive scale. The new Mega service is essentially a cloud file storage service like Dropbox or Box, but with aspirations to become a fully functional tool for creating, editing, and storing documents, storing a library of contacts, hosting websites, and more. The service also touts a high level of security encryption, which won’t allow Mega to determine what type of files users are uploading — something that the most popular rivals in the cloud storage space can’t say.

The service was understandably slow most of Saturday and Sunday as people were apparently flooding in to check it out. Mega offers 50GB of free storage and three paid tiers.

The launch event is supposedly the last you’ll hear from Dotcom for a while, the founder said.

“After today I’m going to take myself back more, it’s not healthy. I want a good relationship with New Zealanders and I don’t want to be seen as someone who is always in the media,” Dotcom said, according to TheNextWeb. I find that a little hard to believe considering Dotcom’s history of hogging the spotlight. For example, he has previously released a video calling out the U.S. President, amusic video rapping about his plight, a publicized accusation against Vice President Joe Biden, and is even working on both a new book and a Hollywood biopic.