Some numbers are publicly available, like:
- Number of download (Skype RSS feeds)
- Number of concurrent users online (Skype Client and RSS feeds)
- Revenue (Ebay quarterly results)
- Registered usernames (Ebay quarterly results)
- Number of Skype purchase orders (sequential purchase order number on your Skype account page)
- Number of Skype Forum users (Skype Forum)
- Minutes served (Ebay quarterly results)
- Website visits (Alexa Web Traffic)
This graph shows the ranking of the Skype website visits compared to other websites. Until the end of 2005, there was a clear increase in the ranking position. From 2006 on the popularity of the Skype website has gone down. Is this also an indication of the slower growth of Skype? I would guess so!The blue arrow points to a sudden website popularity increase in August 2007, but this was due to the “unpopular” Skype outage.
3 comments:
Skype's popularity fell into recession almost the same minute Ebay aquired Skype. And Skype's initial popularity was based very much on the pioneer feeling, which practically died when the project was violently integrated with the Ebay business model. I predict that Skype ís going mature and that the number of users will stay at today's levels, and possibly decreasing due to competiton from other attractive VoIP-concepts such as Google Talk and MSN.
I agree on the Ebay factor.
I think however there is still some Skype growth ahead, but not at the speeds we were used to till 2006!
And competition is indeed one of the factors that slow downs the growth.
Thanks for the explanation Martin. Well, you seem to knopw a lot about Alexa! :-)
Everyone has its own specialty.
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