The Oprah effect

A lot of fuss about Oprah Winfrey using Skype for a Webcast, just “google” it. But it probably explains why the downloads of the Skype client are showing a significant increase:

• Around 500 downloads per minute with occasional peaks of 750 in the last months
• Now (since the end of February) around 1000 downloads per minute, with occasional peaks of more than 1500.

Look at the slope of the picture below:

Will the Oprah fans remain Skype customers? Hopefully for Skype, but to be honest this will be mainly an American phenomenon: i didn’t know who she was before this campaign! And although i believe the Skype blog that there were registrants all over the world, i guess the proportion of non-US Americans is quite limited!
I am curious to see if this affects the growth of users online, but it is early to say something about it. What i know is that the increase of this last metric is very good since the beginning of the year!