60,000,000 messages, over 67 months, works out at 895,000 a month - approx 28,000 messages a day.
Or one message every 3 seconds. Campfire could be run from a single small VPS.
I think it's entirely believable that the usage of campfire is that low. All credit to them, they've managed to get people to pay for something people don't actually use very often.
You can't just average them out - you think they have the same number of customers now as they did when they started?
Let's assume they doubled in size every year - I think that's a good if imperfect approximation. That would mean 30m messages sent this year, 80K sent today. A far cry for "a few thousand".
80,000 messages a day is still ridiculously minuscule. It's a rounding error. Average them how you like. Assume exponential growth. Whatever. It's still around the same number of messages that go on in say a single channel on freenode.
That is laughable - as in it can't possibly be right. Can you provide a link to this?
From campfirenow.com: "Over 100,000 people have used Campfire to send more than 60,000,000 chat messages"