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.