First lesson: the ranking of Skype is going down steadily, and this could be again a clear sign of the stagnating popularity of Skype, or, of some degree of saturation. The peak in the ranking of August was due to the outage of the Skype P2P network.But more interesting is the list of visiting countries: in the top 5, USA followed by some quite smaller non-English speaking countries, representing altogether only about
5% of the population of the USA. Why are they visiting so frequently Skype.com?In Algeria, Skype is in position number 66 of the most visited sites (way after Google, Yahoo, Youtube, …) and in neighbouring Tunisia in position 114. So, again, why do the people there visit so often Skype … it isn’t a search engine, an entertainment or news site, or a games or porn site!
I checked Algeria by googling on “ADSL”, and saw that Algeria is now making a quite substantial effort in offering fast internet connections. Therefore i guess a lot of people are installing Skype right after they get their connection. Probably this is also what happens in Bulgaria, Czech Republic, and Slovakia.
Therefore, (and this is again speculation) there is already almost a saturation of Skype users in rich countries (where fast internet lines are very common), and growth is now coming from smaller emerging countries were they are now catching up with the penetration of high speed lines.
2 comments:
Hi Jean, I just topped up my Skype credit and realized that the whole process is completed within the skype client without needing to go to the skype website. There was a time I remember when users would be directed to the website to buy credit. This will have a negative effect on website traffic I imagine.
Hello OnlyeBay,
Yes, this has of course a negative impact on website visits, but in my opinion the purchasing visits are only a small fraction of the visits: most people top up their credit a few times a year, and most people don't even buy credit!
But this is a personal guess.
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