2008-02-23

Real Users

100 Billion Skype to Skype minutes, 276 million users: Marketing and Public Relation people like to throw with huge numbers, and Journalists love to pick them up.

Skype updated recently the metrics for the first number, and of course the result was raising the number (or was it cheating?). As Skype is Peer to Peer, they only can make guesses about the minutes served!

And, concerning the second number, they always omit to say it means "registered user accounts" (including unused and multiple accounts).

But, what about the real(-istic) numbers? Let us play around with the only number provided by the Skype Client, everybody can do the same, and perhaps publish in the comments here his own number.I have 187 Skype usernames in my contact list. Some of my friends have multiple user accounts, others are virtual friends (like “echo123”), others are not active Skypers anymore. Discounting these, i have 132 active contacts remaining. From these, 36 were online on Saturday, February 23 at 12:00 PM GMT+1. This is 27% of my contacts. At the same time there were 8.6 million people online according to my Skype client. Therefore [and here I make a non-scientifical guess], this number represents also 27% of all active Skype users. Extrapolating, there are about 31.5 million active Skype Users. Of course, my sample is quite small, therefore not statistically relevant. But, anyway, quite close to the “other guess” of Hudson Barton, who calculates 30,339,264 million users.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

its 100 billion

Jean Mercier said...

Thanks, corrected.