Where are the 70 million?

End of August we reached a surprising high number of more than 70 million concurrent Skype users online!

The next graph represents the number of concurrent Skype users online on September 09, 2013.

The fluctuations are mainly due to day and night usage of the users in the different time zones. In 2008 I tried to explain the shape of the curve, see my post.

But, what surprised me is the following fact: Monday is usually the peak day in users online, but after the “false outlook induced growth” of end of August we had a quite significant downward trend (rounded numbers):

• Monday, September 09: 62 million
• Tuesday, September 17: 62 million
• Monday, September 23: 58 million
• Monday, September 30: 58 million

See the graph below, showing the downward trend in the two weeks starting on Saturday September 14, the lowest week points being the nights from Saturday to Sunday on 14/09, 21/09 and 28/09, the last one being less then 34 million:

Skype growth stopped? Or still adjustments due to the Outlook.com integration?

It seems I was right: 70 million users online was "Outlook.com fake"!

Two weeks ago we jumped in less than 10 days from 60 million concurrent Skype users online to more than 70 million on August 27, very unusual, never happened before. And also not normal for the Northern Hemisphere Summer: usually no growth of users online at all during this period of the year. See the bottom of the screenshot of my “old Skype client”, taken on August 22, at 15h26 Belgian time (GMT+2): it shows 67 million people online.

Well, I follow Skype numbers since the very beginning of Skype’s birth in August 2003, and despite the very scarce information provided by the new owner Microsoft I developed a feeling concerning “normal or abnormal” changes in users online behavior. Therefore I dare to make some guesses. Sometimes they are wrong, sometimes they prove to be right.

In my post of August 27 I guessed this was a “fake growth” due to Outlook.com users logging unknowingly on to the Skype application, or double logging in, and it seems I am right. Last week it never went over the 62 million people online, and also today, the maximum I saw was 62 million and a bit.

Such a downfall of about 8 million people online is NOT usual, never happened either. So, what happened?

• Did a lot of Skype users abandon Skype last week? I don’t think so!
• Did Skype change the way it calculates the users online?
• Or change something in the automatic logon of Outlook.com?

Probably something like the two last guesses.

Anyway, what matters, Skype usage is still growing, no doubt about that!

Nice to have readers !

Well, of course I blog hoping to have readers! Is this narcissism? Somehow yes ;-) One of my fanatic readers, Steve Schoen from Hawaii gave the link to the following chart. Not my chart! But yes, made by using my data. Thanks Statista! They mentioned it!

Not everybody is that fair! Nice graph by the way!

And, while I am busy with “myself”, The Guardian also commented on one of my last posts, see here. How long will I continue to blog? Well to be honest, I don’t know. Microsoft doesn’t provide separate numbers for the Skype business, not that I know at least. The only source now is the RSS feed of Skype Users Online. Even the Download Counter (on the same feed) has made some unexplainable strange jumps the last months and isn’t reliable anymore for that reason! And my blog is mainly about numbers … so, no numbers, no posts!

Happy Birthday Skype: 10 years!

10 years of fun ...

• free communications
• improved sound quality (compared with the poor bandwidth of classical phone and cell phones)
• free video
• nice chatting
• file transfer while calling
• free voice messages
• conference calls
• did i forget something?

And some real examples here in this article!


I begun to use it because ...

• the Brazilian mother of my kids could call for free or much cheaper to her relatives
• and I had also quite some friends or even customers abroad!

And the last years ...

• two of my kids lived for many months in Brazil
• my almost deaf mother can't call me anymore by phone or cell phone, but Skype (better sound quality and lip reading) is still possible
• I still have friends abroad of course!

Thanks Skype

70 million people online at the same moment: is this real growth?

We went in about one week from 60 million concurrent Skype Users online to 70 million today!

Never such a growth in the past! The phenomenal growth of the Skype concurrent users online (see the number at the bottom of your Skype client window for older versions or the Skype RSS feed here) is clearly due to the availability of Skype through Outlook.com (the former hotmail service of Microsoft) as announced some days ago here.

But, is it real growth? I mean, will people logging in in their Outlook.com mailbox really use Skype?

First, if I understand it well, everybody (from a limited amount of very important countries) has Skype enabled whenever they go into their Outlook.com account. Therefore they come online without really asking for it!

Second, some people have probably not merged their Skype account and their Outlook.com (or Microsoft) account. Therefore they are « twice » online « on Skype ». This is therefore (temporarily?) inflating the real number of persons online.

Be aware that I was NOT a Hotmail user, and I am still not an Outlook.com user. Therefore I speak without having tested anything. So, feel free to criticise!

Question? Will all these Outlook.com users use Skype? Skype is known since a long time, and most people know about its existence. So, some will be tempted to try it, others tried it in the past and will still not use it, and some are even not interested in trying it at all.

Therefore, the growth of concurrent users online is in my humble opinion partially a false growth.

61.8 million people online at the same time

Today, one of my blog readers (Steve Schoen from Hawaii) told me that we crossed and 60 million concurrent people online and 61 million!

I checked: indeed, 61.891.799 according to the RSS Feed of Skype itself!

This is closer to 62 million! Perhaps we even reach it today!

These new records are quite early in the new season. It happened only once that a million milestone was crossed already in August, and this was on August 29, 2006!

UPDATE @  17h40 GMT: 62 million reached!

Wrong transcript : 1.4 million WHAT ?

I read this title on the web today: What happens online every 60 seconds [Infographic]? They pretend that 1.4 million people connect to Skype every minute.

This would mean that, in a period of 24 hours, if each one of these connections is from different people, 2 billion different users connect every day. With a World population of 7 billion, this doesn’t seem very realistic! And with a maximum of nearly 60 million concurrent users online at peak daytime, it isn’t either.

Of course, several people connect and disconnect several times per day. A more realistic estimate is the Skype estimate of 280 million active users some months ago, see my post of April 7.

So, what is the possible explanation about this 1.4 million number? Well the number is perhaps right, but the transcript is wrong, see the original graph on "Qmee finds out what happens online in 60 seconds". On the pie chart the following is written: “1.4 million Minutes Connecting with Each other” … and this is quite different from the “1.4 million people!”.

Inspiring entrepreneurs wamda? Please do your homework over!

Best season ever

Somewhere in May Skype passed the phenomenal number of 59 million concurrent people online at peak daytime (around 17h30 GMT, when as well Europe, Africa as the Americas are online). This is already, at peak daytime, 1 out of 120 human beings online.

During the Northern Hemisphere “School year” 2012-2013, this million milestones were crossed 18 times, the absolute Skype record, compared to 11 the previous year and 7 the year before (see the chart below).

Where will this stop? When each human being on the planet has a Skype account?

The explanations of the growth are multiple:

• Skype is available on more platforms, even available for the Windows phone and Linux.
• Messenger (Microsoft product) was abandoned earlier this year! Everybody had to replace it by Skype, now also a Microsoft product :-(
• More people online “all the time”, because of mobile devices connected “all the time”.
• Videoskyping is so nice, with the beloved or grandchildren far away or even “pets” (lots of crazy people in the World ;-), or are it the pets that are crazy?).
• And we could go on …

Other interesting phenomenon: from the 59 million crossovers, 48 were on a Monday, see the table, none on a Friday, none on a Saturday. How do we explain this? My guess …

On weekends less people are online: they stay a longer time in bed, go on excursion, visit the relatives, play football, etc. And don’t forget that Christianity Sunday is Friday for the Muslims and Saturday for the Jews, therefore in some countries weekend begins earlier in the week than on Saturday!
I noticed also less people online on national Holidays of big countries, and in Holiday periods like now!

But, why almost always million crossovers (and Skype online users records) on a Monday? I guess some new Skype users install and try Skype when they are home on Weekend. Therefore, when on Monday all the “old users” come online after a quiet weekend, they are joined by the bunch of new weekend testers.

7 minutes Skype calling time per day per user

Some days ago Skype proudly announced that their users spend a total amount of 2 billion minutes per day on Skype.

Some 2 months ago Skype told the world that there were more than 280 million active users each month, see a previous blog!

Using these two numbers, this means that the average daily time spend on Skype calls is 7 minutes per active user! A lot of them probably with video, therefore more enjoyable than an ordinary phone call!

55 million concurrent people online

So, again a million ”crossover”, 55 million people, simultaneously online, on Skype ! Nice! Last (Northern Hemisphere) school year we had 11 milestones like this! This was a record.

The vertical lines are NOT January 1 lines, but 20 of August lines. Why this choice? Because in (Northern Hemisphere) summer there is no apparent growth of concurrent users online. How many already this school year, in fact the 10th school year since the launch of Skype? Count for yourself or see the answer below the graph ...

14 million crossovers and end of June is still quite far away! Yes, the Skype user base is still growing!

Some recent numbers

This blog is about numbers, therefore, even if it is only « copy-paste » i publish what I find, sometimes with comments or own graphs, sometimes without …

On the Skype blog they wrote: “more than 280 million people choose Skype to connect with their loved ones and colleagues every month.”

And then there was also Telegeography:

“International Skype-to-Skype traffic grew 44 percent in 2012 to 167 billion minutes”

Download speed of Skype client accelerating!

If the RSS feed of Skype provides correct numbers (and I don’t doubt about it!) we will see in the next days a serious increase of concurrent Skype users online! Indeed, the last days the number of downloads of the Skype client has a main speed of 4200 downloads per minute, and I even saw a speed of 6375 downloads/minute, never saw such a high speed before! (I don’t monitor on a continuous basis, therefore there probably were even higher download speeds!)

Exciting times ahead :-)

50 million concurrent users online !

Today, Skype crossed the 49 million AND the 50 million marks of concurrent users online !

More mobile devices, the MSN integration and the let’s not forget the natural growth of users worldwide!

This means that one out of each 140 people in the World was online at the same moment (if we forget multiple accounts of one user – I had two running!).

On September 5, 2003 there were "only" 44,444 people online at some moment of that day (I don’t have the hour)!

Where will it stop?

And, 48 million people online today!

Yesterday, a Sunday, 47 million, and more than 48 million people online today. So, this means something is happening.

Steve Schoen, from Hawaii, and one of my most regular readers thinks that two factors could explain this sudden "online users" surge:

• Skype 6.1 for Windows Integrates with Outlook
• Skype 6.1 for Mac Allows Browser-based Calling

Both announcements were made on January 10 on the Skype Blogs!

47 million on a Sunday, first time ever!

It never happened before that Skype crossed a million milestone on a Sunday, but it happened today:

47 million people online at about 18h GMT, thanks to Steven Schoen from Honolulu – Hawaii who warned me!

On weekends Skype usually doesn’t break records. Million Milestones were never crossed on a Friday (Muslim weekend), Saturday or Sunday (Christian weekend), and now for the first time ever a Sunday, strange, almost funny!

And Happy New Year to all my readers!