Download counter down again and again!

Really a pity for me "Skype Numerologist" as my friend Bill Campbell (another crazy Skype user) called me a long time ago. But the download counter is down again (the blue curve on the graph below).I can however tell you that in the time-span February 22 till yesterday March 21, there were about:

• 1200 downloads of the Skype client per minute;
• 45 million downloads in one month.

Strange anyway, that the counter stops working after exactly one month!

(Graph thanks to the Japanese site Nyanyan - see link on the right side)

Skype to Skype minutes

These are the minutes that do not generate revenue, the free minutes, the ones I love most (of course) and that allow me to speak (with video) for free with my son in Brazil!
Comments? Only that the growth is accelerating!

Number of Skype users

I graphed some of the data of Skype’s March 4 update, see also my previous post.
The first graph is the number of “connected users” or in other words the number of active users according to Skype’s own estimates. 124 million users are “connected”. As they say themselves, this is probably an overstatement of the real number of active users.A pity that they put Africa in the same zone as Europe and the Middle East (see the EMEA pizza slice), because Africa is a quite different continent (demography, internet penetration, etc.). Europeans are the champions, with 71 million, more than all other zones together!

The second graph is the percentage of internet users of the concerned zone who are using Skype. 16% of European, Middle Eastern and African internet users are using Skype, compared to only 9% of Americans. We are again the champions (I am European ;-)! Last, are the Asians, with only 3%. This seems to confirm my previous post that shows a disappointingly low number of Chinese users.The next graph is the amount of paying users by zone. Only 8.1 million people pay for Skype services, or only 6.5% of active users. Again, EMEA wins, but here the “Other Americas” loose, only 1.1 million paying customers!


And then the last graph is a surprise: compared to the other zones, A quite lesser proportion of EMEA connected users pay for Skype services, only 5%, compared to about 9% in the other zones. Possible reasons?

• Perhaps the weight of African users with less economical power influences that number downward.
• Other reason could be that, because of the higher internet penetration of Europe, more people can make free Skype to Skype calls, and therefore do not need to pay.
• Third guess: the countries in that zone are smaller, people call mostly in their country, and the phone calls fare is competitive compared to the Skype price per minute (my case in Belgium!).

But, this are only guesses.

20 million active Chinese Skype Users?

In the latest results published by Skype on March 04 I found the following interesting phrase :
“Our registered user number includes users who registered through their MySpace account and excludes users that have registered on Skype through our investment to address the Chinese market, Tel-Online Limited”.

I happen to have the numbers published the previous years, and (unless Alzheimer caught me) I never remembered that they said “excluded the Chinese”!
There is indeed a difference in the numbers I kept and the new published numbers, see the table on the left. The “middle column “Skype-China” are the latest published numbers. The first column “Skype+China” is what they published in the past. The third column is my calculation of the Chinese users. Surprisingly the growth of the Chinese user accounts between 2008 and 2009 was disappointingly low! Pity they don’t publish the 2010 Skype account numbers included Chinese users. See also the graph below.Could this mean there were only 100 million Chinese Skype accounts created, and that therefore there are probably less than 20 million active users? Quite a disappointment compared to the population of China!

(this post has been edited to add 2006 numbers, because Skype published 2007 numbers with growth % compared to 2006).