2010-01-13

Again misleading numbers!

From BusinessWeek, today:
Skype has more than 520 million users and is the largest provider of international calling, accounting for 12 percent of cross-border voice traffic, according to Washington-based research firm Telegeography. Skype has said it’s on schedule to generate $1 billion in sales in 2011.

If the number of users is true, this would mean that one out of 13 inhabitants of this planet is using Skype! As i already said before, this is complete nonsense. If Skype continues to grow, soon they will have more users then people on this World (grin).

What about dead Skype users, users who have multiple accounts (for various reasons going from scamming to honest reasons), users who abandoned Skype, etc. etc. ?????

And I will always continue to mention those Skype lies, every time I discover them!

By the way, congratulations to the new Chairman of Skype. I hope mister Miles Flint will read this, and ask the Skype Management to publish honest numbers!

4 comments:

mvrx said...

I agree with you. I've long suggested that Skype do an account cleanup procedure for accounts that meet certain criteria.

Or at a minimum, they should apply the same logic to the total accounts data as they do to the total people online # that is shown in the Skype contacts tab.

The CMS/Forum software we use on http://s4pg.us has a setting for "Display active number of users" where it allows us to specify a date range of logins that will generate the number.

So, say we have 1000 accounts on our website. We can specify a date range of the last 2 months as our "active user number" generator. If only 200 of our total 1000 users have logged in over the last 2 months, our website says "S4PG Statistics | Active members 200"

I think Skype should apply something like this too and make it a policy to state total number of accounts, along with active accounts.

So we would see something like this in the BusinessWeek image in your article:

Skype has more than 520 million user accounts, with over 142 million having logged in over the last year and an average of 21.2 million logged in simultaneously each day.

Your comment "what about....users who have multiple accounts (for various reasons..to honest reasons)

Our product S4PG.Server provides auto-conference rooms served from generic accounts. Between my developer's test accounts and our public rooms we have over 30 Skype accounts. A valid and honest reason. But still only 4 people that own all the accounts. Once we release our product, we expect this type of environment to grow, where Skype accounts act just like "Service Accounts" in windows, they are there doing things, but that doesn't mean it is a real person.

Jean Mercier said...

Thanks for your comments Aaron!

Anonymous said...

you said "As i already said before, this is big nonsense."

This is not proper English. In Englsh we don't use big + nonsense
Try using
"this is complete nonsense"
hope this is helpful to you.

very good blog btw

Jean Mercier said...

Hello Anonymous,

where did you see "big nonsense", never wrote this ;-)

Joke! Thanks for your comment, I corrected it in my blog. You are one of the few persons who gave me that type of comment, although I know I make more mistakes than that!

Thanks again!