I got a very nice compliment from Russell Shaw at ZDNet: “Jean has this real serious but frankly, real useful obsession. He runs the Skype Numerology blog, a resource dedicated to the evolving and statistically quantifiable aspects of Skype’s download, usage, and related metrics over time.”
Now, Russell thinks that the 2.5% in one week is “natural growth of the Skype user base”, and therefore not linked to the MySpace deal. Let me try to explain why i really think “something” is happening.
When you look at the inserted table, you will notice that it is the first time in 4 years that the growth of concurrent users online has been higher in October than in September! But there is more …
The download speed in October had a mean value of 890 downloads per minute, double as high as September (425 downloads/min.).As my Blogger-friend onlyebay remarked, “It could be all the free publicity that Skype is getting”. Here the HUGE list of October events:
- Skype buttons on eBay
- Facebook games
- The 3-SkypePhone
- A deal with MySpace
- 10 million users online
- High quality video calls
- And last in the list but the first event of the month: Skype CEO steps down!
4 comments:
Jean, Do you think Skype is more successful now when Zenstrom/Fries are out of the picture?
/Alex
hello Alex,
too early to say. Most of the events that happened in October were (i guess so) results of work done in the previous months, when Zennström and Friis were still on the ship.
Let us wait some months!
Hi Jean,
This is great stuff!
I've been looking at your charts trying to understand the number of downloads.
Have you seen the recent increase in downloads continuing?
How do you track the number of downloads please? Is this data published by Skype?
Thank you
I tracked the number of downloads by reading the RSS feeds of Skype. (See a link at the right side of my blog).
However, since November 12, the feed got "stuck" and i don't know why :-(
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