Skype Numerology

Skype calling minutes in 2011

2012-01-19T20:38:00.003+01:00

Steve Ballmer from Skype (or is he from another company ;-) told the World that there were 300 billion minutes of Skype calls in 2011.
I added the data to my “historical” graph.

He doesn’t say however if it are only Skype-to-Skype calls like my graph suggests

He also speaks about 200 million people who used Skype in 2011. The last number is probably still an exaggeration compared to the actual real users (some people test Skype and never use it again) but a much better indication than the number of “user accounts” that Skype used to publicize in the past calling it “users”!

Passed: 31 million milestone

2012-01-16T18:53:00.002+01:00

Finally, after 294 days, Skype crossed again a “million milestone” of concurrent users online: 31 million today, and even 31.545.425 million some minutes ago (at 17:50 GMT*), data captured through the Skype RSS** feeds.

The 294 days waiting time, is the longest period ever between two million milestones, excluding the first million that took 418 days!

At least, some growth again!

*GMT: Greenwich Mean Time
**RSS: RDF Site Summary

Stuck @ 30 million!

2011-12-26T10:57:00.004+01:00

The year ends with a Skype disappointment for me, but let's remind first about some numbers and facts all provided by Skype itself, mostly in October:

Skype is now Microsoft
Integration of Skype & FaceBook
300 million minutes of video calls per day
700 million minutes of free calls per day
65 million people sign in every day

The last number is interesting, because this gives an idea about how many real Skype users there are in the world.

But, there is also « bad » news : for the first time ever since 2004 Skype didn't cross a « million milestone » of users online in the period September to December. In May Skype crossed the 30 million simultaneous people online, and it got stuck around that number ! I don't understand why ...
Graph from the Japanese site « http://skmap.gatagata.jp/ ».

Worries

2011-10-01T13:53:00.003+02:00

What happens with Skype? The last weeks there is a strange behavior with the downloads. Sometimes, during hours, often half a day to more than one day (see the blue curve) it gets like stuck! The mean number of downloads was as low as 270 per minute, while usually it is around 2000 downloads per minute. Is it because they were working on a new version?
Anyway, there is some other reason for concern. End of March we reached the record of 30 million concurrent users online (people being online at the same moment). Every Northern Hemisphere summer there is a decrease of concurrent users online, perhaps because people spend less time in front of the stupid computer screen, and drink a beer in their garden (or other similar reasons, like Holidays).
But, it is now October 1, and still no new record (see the red curve). Should we be worried? Perhaps not. It happened also last year, and in 2007.
A reason for the “not growing online people” could be version 5.5 of the Windows client! The Skype window itself and the Skype home popped up when starting Skype: I know several people who switched Skype off because of this irritating behavior.
I downloaded version 5.6 yesterday, and hurrah, Skypes starts in a “friendly” way again, with only its characteristic whizzing sound.
(The graph above comes from the fantastic Japanese site @ http://nyanyan.to)

The link between outage and more downloads

2011-06-07T19:32:00.002+02:00

Skype is down again, and this happens too often the last years.
But the funny thing is, at the same time the number of downloads of the Skype application raises tremendously. See the dramatic drop down of the users online on the red curve, and the very visible bent in the blue download curve. Why could this be?
I think that a lot of people thought that the Skype problem was their computer or Skype client crashing. Therefore they tried to install a new version, probably to no avail!

The days after Microsoft

2011-05-22T09:28:00.004+02:00

It was big news on May 10: Skype bought for 8.5 billion dollar by Microsoft. Most comments (72% of 187) of Skype users on the Skype Blog were negative or worried: anger, sorrow, fear, ...
The funniest comment was “That's great, how do I delete my account?”!

But the announcement had one very positive effect, see the graph below ...
Before May 12, the speed of downloads was about 700/minute (see the blue curve from the Japanese site nyanyan.to). Then, during a period of about 24 hours there has apparently been some kind of a problem: the downloads stopped! Was there a bug in the download counter or did the downloadservers go down?

And then, after Friday the 13th there were massive amounts of downloads. Skype was downloaded at speeds of 3500 per minute!

It seems that a lot of people suddenly heard for the first time of their lives about Skype!

(The red curve is the daily or nightly fluctuation of Skype users online).

From my Flemish Financial Newspaper

2011-05-12T18:37:00.000+02:00

Translated from Dutch:

I bought Skype!
But I don’t call any longer, because it costs money!

from De Tijd, May 11, 2011

Summer recession is approaching

2011-04-03T18:42:00.004+02:00

Last week, on Monday March 28, Skype reached for the first time 30 million concurrent users online. Nice number! Will it be the last “million” milestone before the Northern Hemisphere summer? Even if the answer is yes, this is already the best season ever. Indeed, since the last 2010 summer, we crossed 7 times a million milestone. The last three years there is a very clear acceleration in the growth of Skype users online.

The graph above shows

“end of August” vertical year lines (horizontal axis)
in the red oval the number of million milestone crossings in “Northern Hemisphere School years”

In 2003-2004 there were no million milestones (but indeed a nice steady growth of Skype users).

Then, the next 4 School years, we crossed each time 3 times a million milestone.

In 2008-2009, it was 5 times, and in 2009-2010 it was 6 times.

So, will we stay with 7 times this year? The summer recession is approaching, and each year we have the same phenomenon: less users online at the same time. Probably people spend more time in their garden instead of in front of the computer, or they take Holidays, and some other “summer” reasons.

By the way: the Skype application download counter is working again (see the RSS feed link on the right side of this blog).

Download counter down again and again!

2011-03-22T20:57:00.005+01:00

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

2011-03-15T22:25:00.003+01:00

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

2011-03-10T19:35:00.005+01:00

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?

2011-03-09T21:47:00.006+01:00

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).

Download counter working again!

2011-02-26T14:18:00.002+01:00

The Skype client has been downloaded 1.855 billion times according to the RSS feed. The download speed is about 1300 times per minute!

The counter was however down since May 2010. And before that date, the last download number was 2.438 billion times! (See the chart).

Why do I have more confidence in the 1.855 billion number? Well, in April 2009 I also noticed that the RSS feed was down, and after working again there was a strange upward jump in number of downloads and speed! I blogged about it and even got some private comments from Skype staff when I pretended that the new download number at that moment was flawed (first they seemed to agree, then they told me the new number was correct)!

Now, the last number of last week seems to be in line with the extrapolation of the download curve before April 2009, see the red line in the inserted graph!

I am happy to have again the number of downloads, because at least, even if it is not the most interesting indicator, it is, with the number of concurrent users online the only number that can be followed up day by day. I would like to receive more information from Skype (financial data, usage numbers, etc.), but the information became very scarce after they left eBay!

29 million concurrent users online

2011-02-21T19:16:00.001+01:00

January 17: 28 million people online at the same time.

February 21: 29 million!

... and growing!

Social Networking iPhone Apps

2011-02-15T22:27:00.002+01:00

On the Belgian iPhone apps store you can find in the top-100 of most downloaded apps this classification for Social Networking apps (by position number of all downloaded apps):

15: Facebook

21: Skype

22: Viber – Free Phone Calls

35: Windows Live Messenger

52: foursquare

55: Twitter

Interesting to see that only Facebook beats Skype!

Two million milestones the same day!

2011-01-10T18:59:00.009+01:00

26 million people online at the same time for the first time ever today January 10. I knew it would happen today, because yesterday – although it was a Sunday, and usually a quite calm day – we almost reached 26 million people …
BUT !!!!!! ……
We also reached 27 million people online some minutes ago (around 17h45 GMT). For the first time ever we crossed twice the same day a million milestone!

AMAZING …

The Skype user base is indeed still growing fast!

(The data comes from the Skype RSS Feeds, but can also be seen in the "Nyanyan graphs - see links at the right side of this blog - or if you look NOW (18h00 GMT), you can see it in the screen of your Skype client)

Skype and Telephone companies

2011-01-07T21:17:00.005+01:00

Telegeography published an interesting article with the title “International Long-Distance Slumps, while Skype soars”.
I manipulated (cut and paste) their graph somewhat and came to this result:

Beware the interpretation of the graph: it shows the “YEARLY INCREASE” in calling minutes (phone traffic –dark blue - and Skype free calling –brownish orange) worldwide, with emphasis on the word “INCREASE”. Total phone calls were 413 billion minutes in 2010, this is an increase of about 16 million minutes compared to 2009 or almost the same growth in absolute minutes as 2009 compared to 2008, but about half the amount of the previous years (2005-2008).
Telegeography is probably right that the economical recession of the period 2007-2009 affected the volumes of international “paying” telephone calls.

But, if we add Skype to the telephone companies, we see a quite different picture: The variation year to year of total minutes “INCREASE” fluctuates around 42 billion minutes from 2005 to 2009. Skype takes a higher proportion of this increase in 2008 and 2009.
AND … 2010 is quite spectacular: Skype generates 45 billion minutes increase in calling minutes, which, adding the telephone companies means an increase of over 60 billion minutes in 2010.
How can we explain this? I will advance some hypothesis:

Some people who didn’t care about “free calling” in the past (because they had the money!) had to switch to free Skype calls, and by discovering the benefits (including video calling) they kept using it and made mouth to mouth publicity.
The growth of the emerging countries, where money is still an issue, and free calls is still an advantage.
Video calling! Almost all computers have now an imbedded webcam, and I guess Skype is one of the main reasons for it!

Look at the good quality of the snapshot I made of a Skype call from Belgium to Brazil some months ago, amazing:

I had sometimes better image quality and often worse, but still … being able to call somebody and see his or her face, FOR FREE … waw!

Is the 16 billion minutes growth compared to 2009 good news for the Phone companies? Not really, there is growth in minutes, but there is also a fierce competition in lowering prices, therefore I guess their revenues are not raising!

Is this good for Skype in the long run? If they can monetize their services in some way, yes. But they said: Skype to Skype calls will always be free! And I believe most new users are only interested in the free voice + video features, including me!

Skype is down (yes again!)

2010-12-22T19:43:00.005+01:00

In August 2006, moments after reaching 7 million concurrent users online for the first time in its history, the Skype cloud got frozen, see my post “Frozen Skype Cloud”, and some more comments in September of the same year.

Well, it seems we have a similar problem today December 22: I could not log in, and the problem isn’t on my side: the concurrent users online are reaching levels of only 5 million users online according to the erratic Skype RSS feeds (5.138.992 at 18:40 GMT), and below 9 million according to the nice Nyanyan graphs, while it should be way above 20 million at this time of the day.

Skype servers down? Skype supernodes down? And why? The Skype blog isn’t accessible, the Skype website seems to be OK, the Skype forum seems to be unavailable, the Skype RSS Feeds gives sometimes the “cannot locate the Internet server or proxy server error”, etc.

And by the way, the Skype RSS feeds don’t give amount of downloads anymore, and this since ages!

So, what happens Skype?

Skype is down (again!)

2010-12-22T19:10:00.001+01:00

I'll publish more in the next minutes!

How Skype kills part of Fring and Nimbuzz

2010-11-26T20:34:00.001+01:00

I also dared to show my disagreement with the less than popular measure from Skype against Fring and Nimbuzz, but Jörg alias Nafcom made a really good analysis about the why's and How's, read here: Nafcom's Crap Blog!: Bad decisions by previous heros in the industry cause people hitting on the forehead: Skype.

No, really not good for the reputation of Skype!

25 million

2010-11-25T20:51:00.001+01:00

25 million people online last Monday, 28 days after the previous milestone. Nice result, still growth of concurrent Skype users online, and the 5th milestone this year. The last months were - in my opinion – deceiving but there still is growth.

In 2009 we crossed 6 times a million milestone.

I don’t think that we will add another million before the end of the year, because there is every year a slowdown of users online in that period, but … who knows.

Skype growth and blow :-(

2010-10-31T18:08:00.006+01:00

Last week October 25, finally, Skype passed another million « concurrent users online » milestone, and reached a peak above 24 million.

Hurrah? Not really! If we forget the first year (2003-2004) this is the second longest period between million milestones: 231 days to go from 23 to 24 million! The last time was in March, after only 49 days, and the previous one was January with only one week between a million.
It looks like competition of Google, Apple and cheaper prices of telephone companies is slowing down the growth of Skype.

Is this the reason that they “killed” two third party developers?
Read about this in Skype Journal: Skype Fring’d Nimbuzz: Another blow to Skype’s developer program.

In the past they killed video add-on developers (Spontania and vSkype), by launching their own video call feature. And they also stole the “birthday warning” idea from other add-on developers, among them the fantastic Pamela Skype toolbox. If I were a developer, I wouldn’t trust Skype anymore!

Where are you going, Skype?

Skype and impaired hearing

2010-10-23T17:26:00.003+02:00

My father died 2 years ago. He was 80, and was the technology man at home, and e-mailed and googled for my mother.

My mother, 76 now, had to learn to do it! First e-mail and browsing. But she doesn’t hear very well …

My oldest son Stefan, and also her oldest grand-child, moved from Belgium to Brasil and is looking for a job there.

My mother therefore decided to learn how to use Skype, and she bought a webcam.

But, surprisingly, when she needs to call me, she also uses Skype instead of her cell phone or landline. No, not because it is free, but, because of the webcam and her impaired hearing.

Her explanation is: she understands better with Skype and webcam because she sees the movement of the lips of the person.

My explanation: the sound quality is often much better.

Probably both factors play a role in her perception of "better understanding".

Nice side effect of Skype!

Geographical numbers

2010-08-11T21:26:00.002+02:00

Why Skype looks at the USA separately, and for the rest looks at regions, not even continents, is quite funny for a “theoretically” European company. But finally they unveil something about the geographical spread of Skype users.

The first graph is the geographical distribution of Skype users. EMEA means Europe – Middle East – Africa. Interesting to see that EMEA still takes the lead compared to ALL Americas (57% compared to 27%). I would even say: Europe takes the lead in the number of Skype users, because the number of Africa and Middle-East users is probably quite smaller compared to European users. Well, historically, Skype started in Europe, and cross border phone calls are still expensive in Europe. Therefore Skype is beneficial for individual users.

The second graph is the number of Skype users compared to total internet users of the mentioned regions. Here again, if I suppose that EMEA is mainly Europe, it looks like Skype can still push its growth in the Americas and Asia. 16% of EMEA Internet users have Skype according to the data provided by Skype (therefore probably 20% or more in only Europe), while the USA scores only 9%. Again, I think that Skype is much more interesting to use in Europe than in the USA, because of the small countries, some State “quasi” monopolies in telecommunication, and therefore high international communication costs. Skype is therefore a fantastic cost cutter. Probably the USA and other big American countries don’t feel that need as much as we Europeans do!

And concerning Asia and Africa: there is still growth ahead for Skype, if these continents continue to promote the internet penetration!

Waw, improved numbers!

2010-08-10T19:15:00.004+02:00

Skype announced yesterday that it filed a registration statement for an Initial Public Offering or IPO.
But, it also had to communicate some numbers, and I copy some concerning the first half of 2010:

95 billion calling minutes over Skype
approximately 40% of which were video
$ 13.1 million net income
87% of net revenues were generated by SkypeOut
8.1 million paying users

But more astonishingly, they also mentioned this :

We have 124 million connected users

Why does this surprise me? Well, until some weeks ago they claimed to have more than half a billion users (560 million), even my Flemish Financial Newspaper still used that number today!
And now they admit that this was an “overstatement” (their words)! That’s what I always shouted out very loudly on this blog! Even the 124 million is probably an overstatement, because some people use several accounts (for instance some scammers and myself), but it is much closer to the reality.
With 23 million users online at peak time, the 124 million users is “credible”: indeed, quite a lot of users have their computers switched off, or do not run the Skype client permanently, therefore the numbers of concurrent people online that you see in your Skype client is an understatement of the real numbers of users.

But, good, Skype will (have to) publish more numbers than the previous months! And I can revive my blog!

Breaking the promise?

2010-05-30T17:34:00.004+02:00

In the past, Skype always claimed that "Skype to Skype calls will always be free".

Well, Skype doesn’t keep its promises anymore. With the release of the 2.0 iPhone Skype app you can read the following statement:

"What’s New in Version 2.0.0?
Call using your 3G connection. Skype-to-Skype calls on 3G are free until the end of 2010, after which there will be a small monthly fee."

What next?

1 billion users soon?

2010-05-22T13:54:00.003+02:00

Some days ago I solved for a colleague a small “Skype microphone problem”, and I discovered something funny. He possesses 4 usernames, because each time he installed Skype on a new computer, Skype asks him to create a new account. He wasn’t aware and it is indeed not always evident, that you can use your old account (if you still remember the password!).

Therefore, is my colleague equivalent to “4 active users”, 4 users, or 4 user accounts? Skype usually uses the term “user” and sometimes “registered user”. Both definitions are of course misleading, as I explained several times in the past here and here and here.

Anyway, Skype continues to claim that they have astronomical high numbers of users, as in the following statement: Skype expects 1 billion users by 2015 of May 21 in boston.com.

What interested me more in that article, was that I finally got the yearly revenue number of 2009: 716 million US$. When we look at the graph below, the growth seems to have been “as expected”.Since the demerger of Skype from eBay, financial reporting became very scarce, unless I didn’t find the right sources yet. I hope they will start to communicate again in a more decent way.

The fastest million ever

2010-01-19T18:52:00.003+01:00

Yesterday Skype reached another million milestone: 22 million concurrent users online. There was never such a short time span between two million milestones! Only 7 days!
Therefore this is two records at once!

At the same time several bloggers and web papers reported the recent numbers of TeleGeography: “Skype traffic increases at astonishing pace”;

Astonishing, and still, not really surprising: Skype to Skype calls are free and the quality of the calls is superb, video included!

Again misleading numbers!

2010-01-13T19:45:00.005+01:00

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!

21 million concurrent users online

2010-01-12T18:52:00.002+01:00

Right now, 18h55 GMT+2 there are about 21,200,000 users online.

But it was already yesterday January 11 that the 21 million milestone was reached.

Well, the growth is going on!

Skype RSS feeds down

2010-01-10T15:27:00.007+01:00

Is this due to the new management of Skype after departing (partially) from eBay?

The RSS feeds concerning number of users online and the number of downloads got stuck on November 30!

I hope the new management will improve the information they provide to the public, and will communicate some "real numbers" concerning the "active users".

Of course, and I hope this doesn't change, the number of concurrent users onlmine is still visible in the Skype client, and right now (15h30 GMT+2, Sunday January 10) it was:

Belgacom loves Skype in Belgium?

2009-11-27T19:29:00.006+01:00

Will my Skype still work?
Belgacom is the former monopolist State owned telephone company in Belgium, and they still have a big part of the market, especially of ADSL internet connections. And although the logos of Skype and Belgacom have almost the same color, I don't think they love each other.

I got a very disturbing e-mail this morning. I translate it from Dutch:

"Dear customer,

To provide your internet connection with the most optimal protection against viruses, hackers, etc. Belgacom takes continuously a lot of protective actions. Therefore, from Monday November 30 on, we implement a major protection intervention on our network: TCP-ports 80, 23 and 443 will be closed for all external traffic towards your network (incoming sessions …)

If you use your internet connection simply to surf or to mail, then you will not notice anything and you don’t need to continue to read.

Only some very specific applications (like web servers) will not work anymore."

And then they give instruction how to unblock the ports!
(The red marked text above is their "marking").

So, will my Skype still work? Technical people know that Skype uses the ports 80 and 443. I am curious, and am awaiting Monday 30 to see what happens. I’ll give feedback for sure.

And of course, there is a workaround, but …

[Feedback November 30: it still works!]

50 million or half a billion?

2009-11-25T22:28:00.003+01:00

Read the Skype blog here!

Fantastic! As usual they claim they have huge amounts of users, in this case they say: (Skype) already connects over half a billion people around the globe through voice and video conversations that span oceans and time zones.

Why do they exaggerate? Why do they forget to say that it is “usernames” they should say, not users!

I have registered 26 usernames, and I use usually only one. Am I “26 users”?
My father died last year (unafortunately). Is he still a user? Perhaps he is still alive?
My brother lost his password and made a new account. Is he two (2) users?
Some spammers register new usernames every day. Are it always different users?
And a friend tried Skype, but doesn't use it anymore. But he is still a user, according to Skype!

No, no, no, Skype probably has only some 50 million regular users, not half a billion. How do you otherwise explain that there are ONLY 20 million users online at the same moment at some moments of a day?

When will Skype stop with those lies?

20 million users online

2009-11-15T14:57:00.004+01:00

Late, yes I know, I am late to report it (I was abroad and didn’t use internet).
I was warned by Dick Schiferli from Pamela that Skype reached 20 million concurrent users online for the first time last Monday, and he published it on his PamNews.com blog. This is the 6th time this year that Skype adds a million. Concerning this metric, this is a fantastic year for Skype.And while I mentioned Pamela … some readers are perhaps wondering what Pamela is? Well, it is really “THE Swiss Knife” for Skype: answering machine, video and voice recording, birthday announcements, mood editor, automatic chat answers (when you are away for instance), etc. Really fantastic: see www.pamela.biz.

And you want to fax with Skype? Impossible you think? Click on the next icon :-)

Skype Tip No Worm

2009-11-08T09:55:00.002+01:00

I got a strange warning message this morning after starting my computer:According to the Skype Forum, this isn't a worm or other intrusion but a Skype feature related to Firefox or Explorer, see Skypenames.exe: what is that?.
It could explain why my Firefox experienced some serious slowdowns the last weeks. But anyway, nothing to be really worried about. But, why is it called a "useful tip" while i disabled all my "notifications" in my Skype Options?

What I am worried about (for Skype): how many people will get scared and will uninstall Skype?

Quarterly results Skype

2009-10-25T16:58:00.004+01:00

Skype continues its steady growth, but the financials don’t convince me!

Skype to Skype minutes grew quite well, more than 8%. However, this doesn’t generate direct revenue. The revenue comes mainly from people calling fixed or mobile lines, therefore from SkypeOut.SkypeOut minutes grew by some 3%. But, when looking at the slope of the curve, paid minutes seem to reach some saturation level, meaning that the paying user base is slowly reaching a kind of maximum.

This is reflected in the revenues, although the graph in dollars shows an increase of about 8%! Indeed, 80% of the revenue of Skype is coming from outside the USA. Therefore, the weakness of the dollar or the strength of the euro and other currencies has a positive impact on the dollar revenue.Recalculating the financial growth of Skype in euros, it is only a 3% growth. After all, this is really quite good: very few businesses can show such a growth in only one quarter. But, what concerns me is the slowing down of the growth of SkypeOut minutes! Something has to be done on that side!

And ... again a million

2009-10-05T19:27:00.008+02:00

Only three weeks, and the second time this year that Skype adds a million concurrent users online in only 3 weeks, (this is a record speed) and also the fifth million milestone this year, another absolute record. And the growth goes on despite competing products, lawsuits, new owners, eBay, Police and intelligence agencies threats and unhappiness, ...
I am really interested to see the quarterly results of Skype within eBay, and perhaps one of my previous earnings predictions will be way too low.

RocketMan flew away

2009-09-15T22:06:00.003+02:00

He was one of the biggest helpers on the Skype Forum, we even had some ocasional private chats. He was a very nice man, and although he fought his illness, he left some days ago wife and kids and (least important) our Skype community.See also the post of Raul Liive, Skype Staff on the Skype Forum.

18 million online at the same time

2009-09-14T18:47:00.001+02:00

The best measure of the growth of Skype users is still the top "concurrent users online". After the "usual summer recession", we finally reached today a new top of 18 million concurrent users online at about 16h GMT.
I am really happy to see that Skype is still growing as expected.

Real wedding of a virtual contact

2009-09-05T18:58:00.004+02:00

For us Belgians, the Dutch province Friesland is about the End of the World. Yesterday I went there for the first time of my life to “really” meet one of my “virtual” Skype contacts for the first time in the 4 years that we know each other. And it wasn’t an ordinary visit: I got an invitation for her wedding (yes, it is a woman).Ike is one of the few persons who fell in love with Skype, became a Skype Forum contributor, then got the Super User recognition from Skype, got promoted to Forum Moderator, and finally works now for Skype! You can read part of her story on her own blog.

It was a very beautiful wedding. Tjep, her husband, is a very nice man with – just alike Ike – a huge sense of humor. Only the Gods were angry, because it rained quite a lot. But, probably they were jealous!

Skype is leaving eBay

2009-09-01T21:26:00.004+02:00

Having a Skype blog, and although this post isn’t really about numbers, I really have to publish it: A New Chapter is the title of a blogpost on the Skype Blog by Josh Silverman, CEO of Skype, concerning the “spinning off from eBay”. Now not a speculation anymore, but facts. Read the post!

Three comments on this:

Will Josh stay as CEO? I hope so, because I liked his style (seen from a distance - I am not an insider);
I disliked the takeover by eBay from the beginning, therefore I feel relieved;
I hope they will publish other – better – more reliable – more honest – more ... numbers! This will revive my blog!

Anyway … good luck Skype, thumbs up!

For the sake of completeness ...

2009-08-17T22:22:00.005+02:00

I am still not in a blogging mood, enough work, and other nice things to do.
Anyway, here my update concerning the contribution of Skype’s business to eBay benefit or loss, see previous posts for more explanations …

Quarter 2, 2009 results

2009-07-26T19:35:00.009+02:00

I don’t blog that often the last months, mainly because I have a lot of professional work. It doesn’t mean that I am not awake and listening to the Skype eco-cloud. And better late than never, but here my last analysis of the Skype Quarter 2 results.

Usernames (not equal to USERS!) grew linearly as in the previous months.
The revenue growth quarter to quarter was in US$ quite stronger than the previous one and in €uro linear! Probably the stronger dollar growth can be explained mainly by exchange rate differences.
The revenue per user name is still quite stable. As I said many times before, and I will continue to repeat this, this is a useless metric. It would be better if we could have the revenue per active user!
Skype to Skype minutes showed again a slightly less fast growth.
SkypeOut minutes showed also and again a lesser growth!

Financially this was a good quarter, in US$. But, I am a little worried about the slower growth of Skype minutes. Is Skype beginning to saturate? I am curious about the growth of users online in September, after the yearly summer recession. Only then I’ll know if my concern is justified.

Skype Poll

2009-07-20T16:16:00.005+02:00

Fellow Blogger Hudson Barton is doing a small poll about how you use Skype.

It would be nice to help him to obtain a significant result. Please answer his questions at this link: [link not valid anymore]

No fixed line anymore

2009-05-08T17:05:00.005+02:00

I just received an e-mail from my brother Paul, and i translate from Dutch:

Hello everybody,
Just to let you know that from June 1 on you will not be able to join me anymore on my fixed line 09/259 ** ** because I cancelled it.
You can still reach me on my cellular phone 04** ****** or on my Skype account ‘p**********e’

OK, good, this certainly is a cost saving decision, and he didn’t use his line for professional purpose anyway! And probably some of his friends will wonder what Skype is (if they awake out of the stone ages) or will think: "well that Skype stuff seems to work!". Viral marketing? Yes!

Skype Contribution to eBay

2009-05-03T15:07:00.004+02:00

eBay published their SEC filings, or in other words additional information on the First Quarter results. The most important additional information is the “Contribution”, defined as: “Direct contribution consists of net revenues from external customers less direct costs”

Here the evolution graph:
Interesting to see that after a dip in the last quarter of 2008 the contribution seems to rise again to 36 million US$ or 28 million €. In Euro, this is the highest number ever achieved. This seems promising, and as 80% of the revenue is outside the USA, in my opinion the Euro number is more relevant than the US$ number.

The contribution per “user name” - I emphasize “user NAME” – is stabilizing around 8 dollar cent per quarter, but this number is useless. Better would be if Skype provided the number of active usernames. If we estimate that there are about 45 million active users, the contribution per active user is however 81 cent per quarter! And if we estimate that only 20% are paying customers, each customer is spending about 4 US$ per quarter.

Download counter working again?

2009-04-24T10:40:00.008+02:00

The results of the Skype RSS feed of total downloads of the Skype application according to the RSS feed of Skype:

March 17: Total downloads = 1,168,075,188
March 17: RSS feed stuck at the above-mentioned number until March 27
March 27: Total downloads = about 500,000,000 during some hours
March 27: Correction to about 630,000,000 downloads
April 13: Sudden jump to a little bit less than 1,338,000,000 downloads

See the graph.
I think they messed it up at Skype. If the numbers are right, it means that between March 17 and April 13 they had an increase of about 170,000,000 downloads or a mean speed of 4374 downloads per minute!
I don’t believe this, because I personally NEVER saw such a high download speed (I don’t say it never happened for very short time spans however!) The total number of downloads is still wrong in my opinion.

Why worry? Well I don’t! The total number of downloads is as useless as the total number of registered usernames (you know, the 450 million usernames that Skype likes to claim they have). What would be useful, is to know how many Skype clients are “active” or used!

So, why do I follow that number anyway? From the number of downloads, you can derive the download SPEED. And THIS is interesting. Because increases in the download speed could indicate that something is happening!
As you can see I have noticed occasional downloads of 3500 per minute. But, the last years the speed has mainly been around 600 downloads per minute. Therefore every speed above 1000 catches my attention.

The last weeks have been quite interesting in this regard with speeds as high as 2400 downloads per minute. Indeed, there have been interesting announcements: Skype for SIP, and especially the Skype for iPhone!

Quarter 1, 2009 results

2009-04-23T00:30:00.006+02:00

This was the very first time I listened live to the eBay conference call. It was even funny at some moments, see the end of my post.

But, first, let me be very clear: John Donahoe, in the Questions & Answers said very clearly that Skype has no synergies with eBay!

Now the results:
Usernames (not equal to USERS!) grew linearly as in the previous months. I have to admit I am somewhat surprised, because the users online grew better than linear!
The revenue growth quarter to quarter was stronger than the previous one as well in US$ as in €uro! This is good news of course.
On the other hands, the revenue per user name is still going down in US$ and went slightly up in €uro. As I said before, this is a useless metric. It would be better if we could have the revenue per active user! But Skype doesn’t disclose this. The revenue per user name will - in the long run - continue to go down, because of the many "dead user names".
Skype to Skype minutes showed a fairly good but slightly less fast growth, but of course, this is a “no direct revenue generation” metric. There are some indirect effects, like revenue coming from the Skype certified products (even bought by pure “Skype to Skype” users).
SkypeOut minutes showed also and again a good growth, but – alike the Skype to Skype minutes- slightly slower!

Was this a good quarter? Indeed it was! In those economical unstable times, growth is an exception!

What about the expected revenue for 2009 as a whole? Well, i lower my previous estimate of 750 million to only 650 million US$!

And then the funny things, of the Questions & Answers time for the analysts, with only one question allowed:

John Donahoe begun answering the first question of the first analyst by saying: “congratulations for your new house”! What the heck?????
And then some moments later it was the other eBay guy (I don’t remember his name, but i think it was the Financial Officer) saying : “let me take your second question of your one allowed question.”

Funny, but at the other hand a pity that they respond to two questions, because it takes away time and therefore the opportunity for some analysts to ask questions. They could be tougher and ignore the second question! Several analysts dared to ask more than one question!

iPhone Skype app still in 6

2009-04-21T12:19:00.003+02:00

After 3 weeks, Skype is still in position 6 in the TOP FREE APPS of the iTunes most popular applications today (in the Belgian App Store). But it is going "down" fast. No more comments on my side. I posted this for the "fun of the graph".

The valuation of Skype

2009-04-17T13:04:00.003+02:00

Wandering over the internet i found several comments on the value of Skype for instance here and here.

Interesting to see (in one of the above mentioned links) that an analyst predicted a revenue of $786 million (for 2010? I guess this was a typo, and they meant 2009) while I predicted in a private chat with some Skype fanatics $750 million for 2009 some days ago.

Well, lets wait till next week to refine the predictions: eBay will divulge their results for the first quarter of 2009!

[EDITED] Added on the graph the weighted average of the Skype Journal Poll based on 68 votes.

Soon more numbers

2009-04-15T15:30:00.005+02:00

This morning, before looking at my computer, i read the "Skype IPO" in my Flemish Financial Newspaper.

Only two comments:

They soon WILL HAVE to provide more numbers.
They still FALSELY claim that they have more than 400 million users.

NO, NO, NO, i will repeat what i commented several times in the past: they probably have about only 40 million real active unique living users. But yes, there are more than 400 million registered user NAMES, quite a difference!

2 million downloads of iPhone Skype app!

2009-04-09T09:49:00.004+02:00

Skype announced it yesterday: 2 million downloads of iPhone Skype app!
This represents 12% of iPhone users or 7% of the combined iPhone and iPod Touch users. Impressive! I still believe that most of the Skype apps are downloaded for the iPhone, therefore, bold guess, 10% of iPhone users downloaded the Skype app.The download speed (right scale of the graph) went down from more than 400 per minute to 100 now, but this is quite normal!
This will certainly have an impact on the total number of Skype users, as some of these iPhone users are new to Skype, and will also install it on their computer, but I guess the effect with be quite marginal because:

iPhone users are usually “wealthy” and have also money to make expensive calls, therefore their “need” for free or cheap calls is lesser.
The Skype app can’t run in the background on the iPhone!
And, like all free applications, a lot will try it, but won’t really use it.

But … the launch of the iPhone app has made a lot of publicity for Skype, therefore the “viral” growth will get a boost again!

Voice on the Web

2009-04-08T11:51:00.002+02:00

I was wandering in the Skype Journal pages, and suddenly i noticed that there are only posts from Phil Wolff. Where is Jim Courtney? Well, i didn’t notice when i should have, but he started his own blog, all about voice applications on the web, and with the straightforward title:Click on the logo to go to his blog!
Good luck Jim!

Skype, how many downloads?

2009-04-07T11:47:00.003+02:00

1.2 billion downloads of the Skype client, or only half of that?

Data from the Skype RSS feeds:

March 17, 13h45 GMT: 1,168,075,188 downloads
March 27, 23h20 GMT: 628,899,379 downloads
April 07, 09h15 GMT: 647,446,472 downloads

On September 28, 2008 Josh Silverman claimed: “Celebrating 1 billion downloads”.

So, Skype, what should we believe?

i need a male opinion about something ...

2009-04-03T14:29:00.013+02:00

[31/03/2009 10:29:34] Mary Criswell:
Hi , And how is yur work and evry thing around u ..... I was looking at in the directory, i saw your name, and you seem interesting! I need a male opinion about something ... Would you like to check out my pics and profile..?

This is a fictitious chat message based on real samples of phrases! What SPAM is for e-mail, SCAM is for Skype. Will it take the same proportions?

I hope not, but it begins to worry me. I got the last month 22 such messages, from all kind of countries: Côte d’Ivoire, Liberia, China, Morocco, Bulgaria, Turkey, some without information and quite often from Kumasi in Ghana and even one from Kumasi in the USA ! Most are woman names, but of course it could well be man sitting at the other side to try to rip you off. Only one tried to call me. Several asked to add them to my contact list.

OK, I could change my privacy setting and only accept chats and calls from known persons. But as I have a business this isn’t an option.

And to make it worse, since some months, when somebody asks you to be added to your contact list, you get an UNWANTED e-mail repeating this demand. It wasn’t like this in the past (no mails!). This is a change Skype introduced without much publicity and without asking. I understand the economic logic of it: it should boost the growth of users. But, it could as well chase users away, as they will perceive these mails from “Ghana Women and similar” as SPAM. You already get the SCAM demand on your Skype client and then you get it a second time in your mailbox. NO SKYPE, wrong way

You can disable this by going in your account page in the e-mail settings. In my opinion this should be unchecked by default. I don’t need twice the same message Skype !!!!

[EDITED:]After a remark of Vincent: it could be you get only once the message, either by mail, either through your client - i'll have to check.
[EDITED: 04/04/2009] I got a request twice, one on my client, and one a day later by mail!

600.000 iPhone Skype apps!

2009-04-02T10:13:00.003+02:00

Robert Miller, Skype’s General Counsel wrote yesterday: “An interesting fact: at the time of writing, 24 hours after launch, more than 600,000 downloads of the software had taken place on the App Store”.
This is about 420 downloads of the Skype iPhone application per minute! I suppose quite a lot of these people didn’t know Skype before, and are also downloading the Skype client on their Macintosh or PC. By viral collateral growth (the publicity, etc.) there will also be a growth of “non-iPhone” users.

Apple has sold more than 17 million iPhones since it launched it’s “hyped” machine.
This means that in one day, 3.5% of the iPhone owners downloaded the application. This is impressive! Of course, Skype is free! And i would not be surprised that within a few days much more than 10% of the iPhone users will have downloaded the Skype application.

Well, well, as I said several times in the past months: exciting moments for Skype! Even the fact that Deutsche Telecom told it will block Skype (unless it was indeed an April’s Fool Joke) is in fact fantastic publicity for Skype. If it isn’t a joke, well then Deutsche Telecom is itself a very “fossil” non-joke: as all former State Monopolists they are accelerating their own death by such measures. People will be aware there is something threatening for Deutsche Telecom, and will try to find out how to circumvent the blocking!

[EDITED ON April 3] Not worth another post, but one million downloads in less than 2 days

2500 downloads per minute!

2009-04-01T16:33:00.004+02:00

Yesterday and today I noticed huge downloads of the Skype client.

While it was around 600 downloads per minutes until some days ago, yesterday I noticed speeds up to 2500 downloads per minute! Now at 14h40 GMT it is already above 2000 downloads per minute and still rising. (During the GMT night the speeds goes traditionally down).

The last time that I noticed such huge speeds was in 2007! Could this be the iPhone Skype application effect? Is the number of downloads of the Skype application already included in the counting system? I guess the answer is yes on both questions!

I think we will see the growth of concurrent users online continuing to increase as fast or faster than before in the coming weeks!

Skype on iPhone - end

2009-03-31T07:25:00.004+02:00

RSS number feeds Skype are working

2009-03-30T17:54:00.004+02:00

Yes, since some days, the RSS feeds of “Total Skype Downloads” and “Users Online Now” are working again. However …

The download counter stopped on Tuesday March 17 at the number of 1,168,075,188 downloads.

Then on Friday 27, it suddenly began to count again, but starting around 500 million downloads, and some hours later it jumped up to about 627 million. It keeps counting, but it seems Skype lost half of its historical downloads. I guess this is a bug, and that the engineers are still trying to solve it.

[EDITED AT 18h25 GMT+1] Some minutes before i published this post the download counter got stuck again at 633,382,728 downloads.

What caught my attention however is the download speed! It has risen to 1200 downloads per minute, while it was less than 600 per minute before the “counter crash”. Impressive acceleration, and I made some speculations in the past about the reasons, without being sure.

[EDITED at 18h50 GMT+1]~~And another change: the time indicated in the RSS feeds is now GMT+1! (In the past it was GMT!). Why can't they be more consequent at Skype? GMT would be nice!~~

Skype on iPhone – act 2

2009-03-27T00:10:00.005+01:00

No, don’t worry, i will not change my blog in an iPhone blog, but ... Some days ago I said there was a quite interesting solution called Fring to “Skype” on an iPhone.

Well, long before I bought my iPhone, I was a regular reader of the Belgian iPhone blog (French language) and I read something very interesting tonight! They quote another blog: according to Gigaom, Skype for iPhone could be released as soon as next week.

Om Malik is usually very well informed, and has some direct contacts with Skype Staff. If he dares to write it, it should be true!

Skype = 8 % of international calls

2009-03-25T16:47:00.002+01:00

Today I called 37 minutes with India. In fact it was a “social call” with a former colleague who lives there. Would I have called him if it hadn’t be a free Skype call? Certainly not.

Several bloggers or journalists comment on the new statistics of TeleGeography on calling. For instance David Meyer on ZDNET.
TeleGeography mentions that “not all of Skype's traffic is a net loss for international carriers”. My call to India was clearly one of these!

Some TeleGeography numbers concerning 2008:

Cross border telephone traffic: 384 billion minutes
Skype international traffic: 33 billion minutes
Total: 417 billion minutes
SkypeOut (Skype to landlines): 8.4 billion minutes

Skype itself says it provided 65.5 billion Skype to Skype minutes in 2008! If we believe those numbers, half of the Skype to Skype calls are international conversations!

The growth of Skype is quite spectacular!

2005: 2.8% of international calls
2006: 4.4%
2007: I didn’t find data, but let us suppose 6%
2008: 8.0%

I have to admit that the news concerning Skype is definitely positive the last months! I am curious to see the first quarter results!

17 million, waw again a million!

2009-03-23T18:35:00.002+01:00

Again a million milestone of concurrent users online today: 17 million at 17h34 GMT (my clock in the screenshot is GMT+1)!!! This is the fifth time since September 2008! This is quite remarkable, because, as mentioned before in this blog, it is also the first time we add more than 5 millions in a September – June period.

Exciting times ahead! And a pity that Skype doesn’t tell us from which countries the growth comes from, although they unveiled a little bit of the picture some weeks ago. They gave much more detailed information in the past, before they were eBay! See for instance this blogpost from April 2005: Whose net is it anyway?. First hand information from the CEO himself!

Skype on iPhone?

2009-03-22T14:32:00.008+01:00

In December 2003 I bought a SonyEricsson P900 smartphone. I loved it. FANTASTIC apparatus! But, the battery was dead (since almost a year I was charging it almost continuously on my laptop USB port!), most of the keys didn’t work (but i had the touchpad), it was full of scratches, etc. Therefore I replaced my SonyEricsson by an iPhone. Why? The HYPE, and my former love of APPLE … yes certainly. It isn’t a shame to admit this.

After some weeks playing with my iPhone, I have to say I am not impressed at all! I compared my SonyEricsson with the iPhone, and of course a word on Skype!

The good things:

Fantastic photo rotating and zooming function.
Yeah! WIFI! Fantastic too!
OK: great applications (but I had also great applications with my SonyEriccson).
Bookreading: quite some interesting free books.
Much more games and applications although I don’t use them often.

The things I used a lot on my SonyEriccson and aren’t on my iPhone:

Voice commands: I could do voice “recognition” calling with my SonyEriccson (Saying “Claudio” and my “SonyEriccson” called my son Claudio)
Copy – Paste (it seems it will be in the 3.0 iPhone version)
Handwriting: I could write on my screen to add or change data in my calendar or any other application.
Videocamera! Ooh, what an iPhone disappointment (I knew it in advance), although … when you jailbreak it you can have it!!!!!!
I could use my SonyEriccson as a memory stick! NOT possible with the iPhone!!!!
I could synchronize it without using a cable for instance with an infrared connection!

And the things I am disappointed from and that aren’t related to my former SonyEricsson:

I hate the omnipresence of iTunes on my PC. iTunes is all about selling music and applications, it isn’t very user friendly either. I use AIMP2 for music, an amazing piece of Russian software with lots of extras!
Loading videos: only MPEG, and most of the time it doesn’t work even for original MPEG videos.

Skype?
Well, no native Skype on the iPhone (not on the SonyEriccson either) but yes, a very good replacement for it : FRING, only through WIFI (for the time being). But great! Fring also shows me, besides all my Skype contacts, my (very few ) MSN contacts (two of my 3 kids and some other few persons)! I can call, I can “SkypeOut” and I can chat when on WIFI. Lovely, thanks Fring! AND IT IS FREE!
But ... other dissapointment: if i want to launch another application while "fringing", Fring stops: no multitasking of iPhone applications!

To be honest, if they steal my iPhone I will scream, but only for the money. And probably I will do a more technical market comparison before deciding what will be my next mobile phone, instead of following the HYPE.

What happens with the Skype numbers?

2009-03-20T09:52:00.002+01:00

I am quite worried for my main data sources related to my blog. Skype provides through an RSS-feed “real time” data concerning “Users Online Now” and “Total Skype Downloads”.

Well, some months ago the “Users Online Now” stopped working (it shows 0 users online) and since Tuesday afternoon (somewhere around 13h30 GMT) the cumulative counter of Skype downloads got stuck on 1,168,075,188 downloads.

Downloading isn’t impaired (i tried and succeeded to download), therefore the counter is “broken”. I hope this is a temporary problem, because my blog lives from those numbers.

Anyway, the most important number, being the “Users Online Now” or “People Online” as it is called in the Skype Client is still available through the Skype Client itself in the "Skype Contacts" tab.

Skype names by region

2009-03-17T00:46:00.005+01:00

Some days ago eBay showed THIS to the Press:
A very long time that this didn’t happen, but finally “SOME” information about the Skype user base by “zones”. It is worth what it is worth, of course not much, because they are again CHEATING. Indeed they forget AS ALWAYS to tell to the press that the numbers ARE NOT = ACTIVE USERS! See my previous post concerning this matter here and I even found a post dated August 17, 2005 of Stuart Henshall, the original founder of Skype Journal: 50 Million --- Bull --- Skype complaining about the same cheating!

I am also quite surprised that they did put Latin-America and Africa (and Greenland) in the “Rest of the World”. I believe this is a completely STUPID split up. It would have been so easy to diferentiate at least Africa and Latin-America. But, if you read between the lines, this clearly shows that Latin-America and Africa are not important for Skype-eBay! The "rest" of the customers! I wouldn't like to be called like that!

Secondly: thanks for the fantastic abbreviations without legend on the slide: APAC? US/CAN? (how us can guess?). Of course I guess CAN=Canada and APAC … well Asia Pacific Australia C????? I Googled, but there are so many possibilities for APAC. Well, I’ll invent another one for the row of abbreviations: RoW = Rest of World.

OK, I stop with the complaining! Let us look what we can learn about the numbers.

Converting the absolute numbers in percent we get:

Europe: 36%
APAC: 36%
RoW : 15%
US/CAN: 13%

Let me remember the less attentive reader: these Skype numbers are representing the spread of the cumulative number of registered usernames (not even equal to user “accounts”), including dead, unused, multiple, spam, sex, spare and other user names!

Hudson Barton estimates the spread of “real users” (based on a time zone pattern analysis of the concurrent users online) like this:

Americas: 41%
Europe & Africa: 34%
Asia & Pacific: 25%

What looks quite strange is the huge difference between the US/CAN number of 13% and the Americas of 41%. Even if we add the whole RoW number to the US/CAN we only get 27% compared to the 41% of Americas (Hudsons’ number). Please be aware that we are comparing apples with oranges! And i think Hudson's calculation is a quite good one!

On the other hand eBay-Skype pretends to get 20% from their Skype revenue from the USA, for less than 13% of usernames. This seems quite reasonable, because indeed revenue comes mainly from rich countries, and the USA is (still) one of the richest countries of the World.

Anyway, it is clear that Skype-eBay should focus all their attention to the growing user base of the APAC region: despite the economical crisis, I guess that there is more growth potential there! Asia is representing 60% of the World Population!

Satisfaction of the new Skype 4.0

2009-03-09T16:09:00.004+01:00

Nadeem started an interesting poll on the satisfaction of the new Skype 4.0 client for Windows some 10 days ago, click here to go to his blogpost and poll.

I voted “For me it makes no difference”, because, I got used to it, and, besides some aspects I don’t like, there are some improvements also. How would you vote? Go to his page.

The only thing that is (in my opinion) really missing is an option for a very simple interface for beginners and less computer skilled people. Perhaps Skype can take some inspiration from the early years or from what they do for mobile devices?

less contribution :-(

2009-02-23T00:23:00.002+01:00

eBay published some days ago the SEC filings. There is - as always - some additional cost data in it, and between others the “contribution”: this is more or less equal to “benefit before paying a management fee to eBay”, see the explanation in a previous blogpost.The “contribution graph” shows a downward tendency, the first time since i get the data! Hmmm!!!!!
Anyway: Skype is still contributing, therefore profitable for eBay!

More Skypers than Computer users?

2009-02-14T11:30:00.000+01:00

I am really tired of the false marketing bullshit, nonsense and misleading exaggerated information of Skype! Soon there will be – extrapolating - more Skype users than Computer users, and soon afterwards there will be more Skypers than people on the earth! Ok, monkeys, aliens, and ants can also open a Skype account, I agree! It is clear, they want to make “it” big for potential buyers! (Google? Microsoft?). I begun to complain about that false "users" statement 3 years ago!

In the previous days I watched the reactions to the following claim of Skype: Skype growing by 380,000 users a day.
Some people copied it and said “WOW”, others even extrapolate it to 138.700.000 per year, some very few expressed their doubts!

How does Skype explain that there are only 16 million people online at the peak time of the day, and 8 million at “down time”, if they add more than 100 million users every year?

In fact they know very well what they omit to tell to the Press: it is not “users” but “user accounts” or better “user names” that people should hear. Skype-eBay mentions this on their quarterly results presentations: “Cumulative number of unique user accounts. Users may register more than once, and as a result, may have more than one account.”! Unique "user accounts" is not equal to unique "human beings". This is a huge difference!

Again, let me explain why this “users” statement is false information, and why there are much more "user accounts" or "user names" than people using Skype:

Some people give it a try and abandon the username (and usage of Skype)
Some people die (my father last year for instance, or Russel Shaw) and their usernames stay with Skype, no way to delete it.
People register often several accounts for multiple purposes:

They forgot their password and created a new account
Somebody stole their account (Yes, this can happen!)
They created a new account because they wanted to get rid of some of their annoying contacts
They have a work account, a home account, a desktop account, a laptop account, etc.
They are professional spammers and create several hundreds or thousands accounts
They have a primary account and one or more test accounts
They created spare accounts for their kids, wife, mistress, grandma, etc.

I have myself registered about 25 usernames!

The question is therefore:

Is the Skype user base growing? The answer is definitely YES, and faster than ever, but not as spectacular as they claim.
Is the revenue of Skype growing? Almost not!

x Skype accounts on 1 computer?

2009-02-13T13:41:00.009+01:00

I made a comment on running several Skype instances on one computer in my New Years wishes.

And I got interesting corrections from several people. They told me: “type /secondary as a “command line” in Skype.exe”. I had to search on internet how to do it (years I didn’t do that, this is DOS stuff!).

Why is this interesting anyway? Well, suppose your partner has a Skype account, you have one yourself, and your kids have one. Shit … only one computer in the living room, who will run his Skype account? Well, running several Skype instances solves the problem!

Step 1:
Locate your Skype.exe file in (usually) C:\Program Files\Skype\Phone
Right click it, move your mouse to “Send To” and choose “Desktop”:
You have now a shortcut on your desktop.

Step 2:
Go back to your desktop. Right click the Skype icon. Click on properties (the last item on the bottom of the list).
Right click the Skype.exe button:
In the Shortcut tab you see a “Target:" field. Add the following text to it (without the quotes, WITH the space): “ /secondary”.
Close the screen. Done.

From now on, even if you have already a Skype instance running, you can open as many other instances as you want, as long as you log in with another username. In the screenshot below you see 2 accounts running, one logged off.
The only thing I would like is that, when you wander with your mouse over the small Skype icons in the taskbar, that it says which account is using which client. Now it only says “Skype”!

This post is only applicable to Windows computers. I apologize for Linux and Apple users. And, it works only with the 4.0 Skype version.

Why did they do this?

2009-02-04T18:54:00.005+01:00

Sometimes I can present numbers, but I don’t have an explanation. Yesterday was the official launch of the 4.0 Skype version. The (40 hours) graph below shows the concurrent users online (red curve) with the typical fluctuations over a 24 hours span and the ever rising download curve (blue curve).However, the speed of the downloads seems to have lowered suddenly and dramatically from about 600 downloads per minute to 250 per minute during a 30 hours time span and back to more than 520 downloads per minute (see the blue dotted arrows that I drew on the screenshot). The change was sudden and unexpected, therefore this was induced by Skype.

Strange also that this happened at a time that we would expect an increase in downloads!

Could it be that the counting system was temporarily flawed?
Did they shut down some of their download servers?

I don’t have any clue!

And ... since quite a lot of days, the RSS feed of concurrent users online doesn't work anymore: it shows 0 (zero) concurrent users online! Another flaw?

The fastest million ever

2009-02-02T18:58:00.000+01:00

It is the second time in 3 months that I have to use the same blog post title. Indeed, it took only 21 days or three weeks to add another million. I made a very wrong prediction in September last year and believe it or not, I am very happy that I was wrong! This is the first time ever that Skype crosses 4 times a million milestone in a Northern hemisphere “fall-winter-spring” period, or "School Year"! And, this 10 months period is only half way, therefore we could see at least one more million, or perhaps even two! Exciting!

SkypeIn for Belgium?

2009-02-01T14:55:00.010+01:00

Often I get the question: “when will SkypeIn be available for Belgium?". I am not Skype Staff, therefore i will probably know it at the same time or later than the press!

Jan Geirnaert is from Ghent, the same city as I am from, but he lives in Malaysia. He seems to like me a lot because he contacted me twice this weekend (see my previous post). I am worried .

Today he asked me to call him on his Belgian number 09298xxxx with my fixed line 09222yyyy. But, I know he is still in Malaysia, and Skype hasn’t added SkypeIn countries in ages! Belgium isn’t available yet!
Well there is an equivalent solution:
I called him, the call was diverted to his Skype account in Malaysia and the quality of the call was OK! I only paid for a local call. He paid nothing for the call itself!

Some price comparisons

My fixed line in Belgium (Belgacom): 7.50 €/month
SkypeIn for 3 months (not yet available for Belgium): 5 €/month
Virtuphon: 5.30 €/month

Virtuphon is available for 39 countries, SkypeIn available for 22 countries only! Dominican Republic, Germany, Hong Kong and Japan are only possible with Skype. Therefore, if we join both, we have “virtual phone numbers” for a total of 44 countries!
[EDITED:] Thanks to the comment of Phil ... SkypeIn also in South Korea, numbers above were adapted.

By the way, Skype seems to rename SkypeIn in “Skype Online Number”.

And thanks to Jan for pointing me to that. I guess he will also blog on it!

Google error?

2009-01-31T16:12:00.005+01:00

Jan Geirnaert from Malaysia – famous Skype blogger by the way – told me that when searching for the words “jean mercier skype” it gives a strange result:

We tried other keyword (for instance “Jan Geirnaert Skype” or anything else) or even other browsers and it always gave that small warning “This site may harm your computer.”. When you click on the search result you get a special "Malware warning" webpage saying: “Warning - visiting this web site may harm your computer!” and you get stuck there. Weird. Strange!

No such thing with other search engines. I think they have a temporary problem at Google.

Updated: problem seems to be over!

Last quarter 2008 results

2009-01-24T14:47:00.008+01:00

Skype revenue growth is flattening: it increased only by 1.2% in US$, and about 3.7% in €. In the eBay slides they say: “On an fx neutral basis Skype revenue accelerated 5 pts” (fx neutral means “foreign currency neutral basis”). Considering the economical crisis, this isn’t too bad.I am however surprised about the weak revenue increase, because SkypeOut minutes rose by 18%. And SkypeOut minutes means revenue. If most people were still calling (like I do) on a “per minute” cost, revenue should have risen proportionally. Therefore, this probably means that most people call through a fixed price “calling plan”. Could it be that, from an economical point of view, this is a "too low" margin product?More spectacular is the growth of the Skype to Skype minutes: this rose by 28%. The economical crisis could have helped to obtain this, because … this is completely free, inclusive webcam calling! One could however expect some revenue increase from Skype certified products (headphones, webcams, etc.). Personally I think this is dying revenue stream, because certified or not, most webcams and headphones and other devices work with Skype! Why should a manufacturer therefore transfer part of its income to Skype?
User accounts continue to show a quite linear growth. I would have expected a stronger growth last quarter, for the same “economical crisis” reason.

Revenue per user account (or should I say username?) show a decaying tendency. But, as I said in the past, this is a very misleading metric, because it includes all usernames created from the beginning, including “dead” accounts and multiple accounts of one user. Pity that Skype doesn’t publish the number of active accounts!Next quarter could be better, because I see a quite spectacular increase of concurrent users online, and this will for sure influence indirectly the revenue stream.

15 million today

2009-01-12T20:52:00.006+01:00

Usually i am the first or second to blog about it. Today, two other fanatic Skypers warned me that I should blog. I was aware, but too busy … 15 million concurrent users online today, congratulations Skype and its users!

So, what is exceptional about this? Not that million added of course, not the 84 days it took to reach the 15 million, but it could be that we add another million before the end of June. In that case it will be the first time in Skype history that we cross 4 times a million milestone in one Northern Hemisphere “school year”.
Anyway, Skype shows a quite strong growth the last months!

2009-01-04T16:38:00.008+01:00

First of all, happy New Year to all my readers.

Running two different Skype accounts on one Windows computer is possible, and has been explained several times in the past, see for instance the explanation of “Peter Mad Raven” here. However, this implied that you should have a computer with multiple accounts.

Today I was starting my spare laptop (Windows XP). My Skype didn’t start and I thought: “Hell, the kids disabled the automatic launching of Skype”. Therefore I started Skype (the latest 4.0 beta version) manually. I didn’t notice however that the startup was still going on. And all of a sudden I had two instances of Skype running on “one Windows user id”. I only got a message that I already was logged in, but I could use the second Skype client to log in into another Skype account. Interesting, I didn’t know! I could chat from one account to another on the same computer and even call! Not very useful of course.

But what IS useful, is that it seems to be possible to run two instances (or perhaps more) on one computer with only one Windows user account. So, if your partner has a Skype account, and you have yourself one, you can run both on the same computer without bothering to enable different Window accounts. Does somebody have a trick to make this “automatic” at startup?
[Edited] Thanks to a comment of Edgaras and a correction by Vincent i learned that this is a feature. The explanation how to do it is here: Does Skype for Windows have command line options in Skype 4.0 Beta for Windows?
In fact type "/secondary" as a command-line parameter to skype.exe and this allows you to start an additional skype.exe instance. This is indeed a very nice new feature!

Download decrease … i got it!!!

2008-12-05T22:16:00.004+01:00

As suddenly as downloads speed went up, it went down again some days ago. Why? I think i saw the light ;-) due to an almost related comment of "Sugar" on my previous blogpost and due to the duration of this event: exactly 4 weeks. I am almost sure this is Skype induced and most probably it concerns automatic updates of the Windows Skype Client.What can we learn about it? Well, only active users (or real users like Hudson Barton calls them) will get an update. Therefore the difference between the download curve “as it should have been” and “as it was” gives an approximation of the number of active users! From my graph it seems there are 36.7 million active users who accepted to download an updated version of the Skype client.This is really very close to the estimates of Hudson Barton (he uses another estimation method), but it is a lower limit because:

probably this concerns only Windows users (not Mac or Linux or others!);
some people like myself already installed the updates without waiting for Skype;
some people refuse to install the update.

And … in this case the definition of active users should be: all users who have been active in the last 4 weeks!

Download speed increase

2008-11-30T17:42:00.003+01:00

Since the first week of November Skype shows an increased download speed. Previously it fluctuated around 500 downloads per minute. Now: 1400 downloads per minute. Almost triple speed since November 5!
I looked at my other data to see if there are other signs, but they are quite contradictory:

Concurrent users online shows a very strong growth, and we could even reach 15 million very soon.
Number of purchase orders doesn’t seem to have an increased growth pattern.
There is since September a downward trend in Skype.com website visits.

I didn’t notice any special Skype “event” that could explain this increase in downloads and active users.

What other reasons could explain the growth?

The economical crisis could be one motivation for people to use the “free calls” from Skype.
Perhaps the “Obama Election campaign” is another explanation of the phenomenon: indeed some “Obama teams” used Skype, see the Skype blogs: US Elections: Skype gets out the vote.

Skype certainly is profitable!

2008-10-25T13:20:00.006+02:00

After publishing their Third Quarter results, eBay also published the SEC filings. There is some additional cost data in it. One interesting metric is “contribution”: this is more or less equal to “benefit before paying a management fee to eBay”, see the explanation in a previous blogpost.
The “contribution graph” shows a very interesting rising tendency.

I plotted the graph also in euro (€), because Skype is still mainly a European company. Quote from their sec filings: “Based on changes in foreign currency rates … net revenues were positively impacted by foreign currency translation of approximately $12.3 million (US$) and $46.6 million (US$) during the third quarter and first nine months of 2008, respectively, as compared to net revenues that would have been recorded had foreign currency rates remained constant.”

Even in euro the rise of the last two quarters is very spectacular. How come? Let us quote eBay again: “… revenues are generated primarily from fees charged to users to connect Skype’s VoIP product to traditional telecommunication networks. These fees are charged on a per minute basis or on a subscription basis, and we refer to these minutes as SkypeOut minutes.”. Well, the next graph shows the evolution of SkypeOut minutes …
There seems to be an accelerating tendency in the last 3 quarters!
Another reason for the spectacular growth of contribution could be cost cutting and/or the focus on the revenue generating activities and stopping or putting lesser priority on some other activities, like what they did with SkypeCasts.
Conclusion: after all Skype seems to make it, even if eBay certainly paid too much for it!

The fastest million ever!

2008-10-20T19:57:00.002+02:00

We needed only 35 days to go from 13 million concurrent users online to 14 million.

These are my screen shots at 17h55 GMT ...

users, user accounts or user names?

2008-10-17T20:02:00.005+02:00

Literally taken from the publication of the third quarter results of Skype:

Skype added 32 million registered users(1) in the quarter, ending the period with more than 370 million registered users around the world.

(1) Cumulative number of unique user accounts, which includes users who may have registered via non-Skype based websites. Users may register more than once, and as a result, may have more than one account.

When will eBay publish the Skype active users? They do it at least for their eBay customers (literally taken from their SEC filings):

Key Operating Metrics and Financial Performance
Members of our senior management team regularly review key operating metrics such as active users, listings, Gross Merchandise Volume (“GMV”), net Total Payment Volume (“TPV”), transaction loss rates, Skype registered users and SkypeOut minutes

Is Skype a tool for calls or chat?

2008-10-04T17:27:00.005+02:00

On the blog of Pat Phelan somebody commented “i don’t like being attached to the computer when I am on the phone - I like to do the dishes, and pick up the apartment or office - multitasking! I do use Skype a lot for text chat.”

So, is Skype mainly used for (video) calling or for chatting? Is it still a telephony replacement?

Difficult to say, no official data from Skype, and I didn’t find any survey on that topic! That was also the question that MuppetMaster asked some days ago on the Skype Forums.

On the same Pat Phelan blog, 11 comments were posted, including one of the blogger:

5 say they use Skype for calls
3 don’t use it anymore
2 clearly use it for chatting
2 don’t say anything about Skype usage

(Yes the sum is more than 11, one spoke about "calls + chats").
This statistic isn’t relevant of course, and it wasn't a poll!

I will now repeat part of my “forum” answer …

I can believe that some people never use Skype to call. Indeed, some have no microphone on their computer, or have not enough bandwidth to make a decent call, and some are even not interested at all to call with their computer.

The only official data we have is what Josh Silverman said recently: "We’ve helped make video calls mainstream, with about a quarter of Skype-to-Skype calls using video".

Now, let me try a tricky exercise:

Skype claims to have cumulated 100 billion minutes skype-to-skype calls.
Therefore last year this was about 40 billion minutes (based on a rough calculation i made).
If a “mean” call lasts about 10 minutes (my guess), this represents 4 billion calls last year.
If there are 40 million active users (raised rounded number based on Hudson Barton his guesses), this is 100 Skype-to-Skype calls per active user per year, or one each 3 or 4 days.

Not too bad, IMHO.
My personal case, rough data from the last 6 months:

about half of my contacts seem to have a webcam.
i have about 5 Skype-to-Skype calls per month, and in less than half of them i use video.
i have about 20 chat messages per month.
the proportion is therefore (in my statistical irrelevant case) 20% calls - 80 % chats.

I anyhow think the discussion is useless. Probably most people installed Skype because they heard about the “free calls + video”. Probably most of these people already had an IM tool installed, and probably most of them now chat mainly through Skype with their Skype contacts!

A lot of “probablies”. If anyone has more information, please let me know.

1 billion downloads …

2008-09-28T11:26:00.003+02:00

Today is the Birthday of my oldest son, 22 years. But also today, at about 9h17 GMT, Skype reached the phenomenal number of 1 billion downloads.

Congratulations Stefan and congratulations Skype !!!
Some comments about this number:

This means about 2.8 downloads for each registered username;
The current mean download speed is about 500 downloads/minute;
In the past there were short periods where the mean download speed was much higher than 1500 / minute;
The last two years the speed of downloads was mainly linear (see the light blue straight line);
A download doesn’t necessarily mean a "new user", as “old users” also download Skype on “new or other computers” and when Skype releases “new client versions”;
And last but not least, Skype belongs to the top ten most downloaded applications ever.

[EDITED]Hehe, Skype was also very aware of the 1 billion, because Josh Silverman blogged on it also some minutes after reaching that milestone, but I think I was first: I posted at 9h26 GMT, and he posted on 9h35 GMT! ;-)

About growth speed

2008-09-27T15:47:00.006+02:00

Each time that I pretend that the growth of Skype isn’t exponential, but linear or even slowing down, fellow blogger Hudson Barton tries to refute it. See his comment on my last post for instance (yes, aaytch, is Hudson himself)!

Perhaps I was a bit too fast and too rude to answer (I apologize for this), because indeed the last 12 months were much better, than the previous 12 months. But anyway, let me analyse the table to the left, to explain why I still feel I am right. The table shows the top or record concurrent users online at several dates in the past.

The third column is the mean daily (rounded) number of additional concurrent users online at “peak time” for a certain time span. For instance:

The last two weeks (before September 22), the mean increase was 35000 additional concurrent users online.
The last year it was 9800 additional concurrent users online.
And so on.

How do we predict the future? Based on the last two weeks (+35000)? Or on the last 6 months (only +5300!), or on the last year? We can’t predict the future of course, we only can make guesses.

Choosing periods smaller than a year is often wrong for predicting long term growth. Changes in speed in smaller periods can however teach us something about temporary effects (the success of the launch of new Skype features, or the seasonal “Northern Hemisphere summer” effect).

For the long term past growth, we the see that the 2007-2008 season (+9800 users/per day) was very much better than the previous season (+6500). Does this mean that the growth is much faster? Is Hudson right? Could be, but in my opinion, the season 2006-2007 (+6500) was a very bad one compared with the two previous ones (+8300 and +10000), and last year (+9800) was just catching up again.

Only the future will tell, and some signs are very promising: Asterisk, Client version 4.0 (a new beta version will be released very soon), Skype for iPhone, perhaps even multiparty videoconferencing, …

Fall-Winter-Summer growth

2008-09-24T21:30:00.002+02:00

As usual after a Northern Hemisphere Summer, the growth of Skype users is again visible. Not that there is no growth in summer, but, less people are working, more people switch their computers off while they are in the garden, or they are traveling and have less access to internet. Therefore, fewer users are online at the same time.

Those summers are very visible on the "million milestones" graph that I published last week. In all the past years, excluding the first year, the dots representing the "million milestones" are quite close to each other (see the brown left braces), except when there is a July-August period in the middle (see the red "summer" arrows).So, what for 2008-2009? I would guess that Skype will as usual add two more "million dots' to its graph before July 2009 (see the Sky(pe) Blue extrapolated dots), going well over the 15 million people online. And I predict also that Skype will reach 16 million concurrent users somewhere around September 2009. But it is only a guess :-)

13 million – congratulations Skype!

2008-09-15T19:51:00.000+02:00

So, today, another million mark was reached: 13 million concurrent users online.
After a very strong start in 2008, where two million marks were reached in a very short time span, we had to wait 210 days for the next million. This was the third longest period we had to wait for a million mark. This also means there is still a good and steady growth of Skype users, and it also means most of them are satisfied with the services offered.
But the growth isn't exponential anymore. The graph seems to show a small downward bending tendency.
I hope some innovations will cheer us up in the near future: a genuine Skype client for the iPhone for instance!

And perhaps another side comment: until right now, almost nobody blogged about these 13 million. It therefore seems to be a no-event!

Alzheimer or a Skype mistake?

2008-09-08T19:27:00.000+02:00

Yesterday i received the following e-mail from Skype:
Your credit balance has expired.

=== What are the rules for credit expiry? ===

credit expires 180 days after your last purchase or action that used credit.
Each purchase, call or SMS message resets the expiry time to 180 days.
Unfortunately, if you don't use your remaining credit the balance will expire to comply with normal business accounting rules.
You will receive reminder emails 30 days, 7 days and 72 hours before your credit expires.

I don’t contest the rules, although I don’t think the “to comply with normal business accounting rules” is a mandatory rule, and it isn’t a very customer-friendly rule anyway. Lucky for me that my Bank hasn’t the same policy.
And it were only some €-cents left on a spare account that I only use for testing.

What is more disturbing is the “30 days, 7 days and 72 hours” reminders. I DON’T REMEMBER HAVING RECEIVED ANY REMINDERS! Alzheimer on my side or a Skype mistake? I any case there is a justified reason for concern!

Customers' choices

2008-09-07T11:00:00.000+02:00

Skype stopped SkypeCasts without previous warning (5 days = no time). Of course this is a total lack of respect of customers and they will loose some of them forever. I didn’t use it, therefore I am not affected, but still … it is a shame, especially “when and how” they announced it!

Microsoft isn’t a specialist either in respect of customers’ choices. My laptop downloaded Service Pack 3, and did reset some of my settings:

I had changed some standard start-up and shutdown Microsoft noises to something less intrusive (in my opinion), but Service Pack 3 (SP3) replaced them with the original Microsoft sounds.
And … SP3 also launched – against my will - Windows Messenger at start-up. Eh … I have an account, but my chat and communication tool is .

Apple isn’t better. Each time I download a newer version of iTunes, I have to disable manually the automatic launch of QuickTime.

Small nuisances, but anyway a complete lack of respect of customers’ choices.

5th anniversary and one less

2008-08-29T19:49:00.006+02:00

Today Skype exists 5 years. Beautiful age, and although the glitter has somewhat faded away, we can say that until now it is quite a success story, perhaps not for eBay, but I don’t care for that.

350 million users they say, or more correct 350 million usernames registered in 5 years, and often a lot more than 10 million people online at the same time is quite an achievement.

Sadly however, somebody who was very close to me died. Therefore one username – and he had only one - will stay unused, and Skype will have to adapt its inflated marketing numbers: 349.999.999 users!

2nd quarter results

2008-08-04T20:56:00.004+02:00

Better late than never, here my graphs concerning the published results of the last Skype quarter. If you want to have some explanation why I recalculate it also in € (euro), see my comments on the previous quarter here.
Revenue continues to rise steadily. Good, no further comments needed.
User accounts also continue to rise steadily. Also good, but see also my previous comments on this misleading marketing trick: user accounts is not equal to active users! Jan in Malaysia also commented on this very recently here.

What seems to be in a downward trend is the revenue per user account:
I am sure the trend would be rising steadily if we could plot the revenue per active user! But it seems Skype is scared to publish that number. Hudson Barton estimates the number of active users to be 32 million, instead of 338 million in his blog here … quite a difference!

No credit card reader … but Skype

2008-07-31T21:46:00.004+02:00

I had very pleasant holidays in Brasil (the typo is intentional, in Portuguese Brazil is BraSil). Almost all internet cafés have Skype installed, headphones and webcam. I used it to phone home to Belgium, and to contact friends or family in Brasil. My Belgian cell phone stayed off most of the time. Even for listening to my cell phone mailbox i used Skype, with the numerical keypad to enter my code, and called at almost normal “Belgian” cell phone call prices.

I traveled around by long distance bus, and went from South to North-East. The duration of some rides was sometimes 24 hours. Bus seats are usually more comfortable than economy class seats on international flights!

Bus tickets could be bought with my credit card. Only in the small colonial town of Ouro Preto, i had to run to the bank, retrieve money and pay cash. But ooh surprise …… the guy at the “Rodoviaria” (bus station) checked through Skype with another agency of the bus company (called “Pássaro Verde” – Green Bird) if there were still free seats on the bus! The company has at least 40 Skype accounts! All their usernames end on “pv” and their full name on “*** | PV”. No credit card reader … but Skype!

Skype everywhere in Brasil

2008-07-17T15:32:00.002+02:00

Salvador de Bahía, one of the most beautiful cities in Brazil ...

Off for Holidays

2008-06-24T19:28:00.007+02:00

Tomorrow i leave for Brasil with my 3 sons, for 4 weeks. This is perhaps the last time i travel with the 3 of them in view of their age (22, 20 and 18). And i go to a country i know quite well, because my kids have the double Belgian-Brazilian nationality, and we have been there several times.

I will use Skype in Brasil in Internet cafés or in the house of friends, to contact my family in Belgium. Brasil is one of the bigger Skype Users Countries.
I don't know if i will blog while on holidays, but i come back for sure.

Skype stops loving MySpace?

2008-06-19T19:47:00.003+02:00

I played around with the new 4.0 beta version. It is still very beta of course, but, apart from the ugly or missing things, there are some nice things in it. Especially the first Welcome Screen, where you can test very easily if Skype is working. Very useful for first time users.

But, what caught my attention is that when playing around with the hidden emoticons, there is one missing. The first image (on top) is an extract of the chat window of the 3.8 version. The second image, at the bottom, is the same chat text and result, and the (myspace) code for the hidden emoticon doesn’t work anymore! Is there some hidden message behind this? Is the deal between MySpace and Skype still valid?
And there isn’t neither an (Ebay) hidden emoticon from what i know!

The new version and numbers

2008-06-18T22:02:00.004+02:00

Don’t download the new 4.0 Skype beta version (i will not post the link) unless you are an experienced user, because there are some vital functions missing, see here in the release notes.

What I can’t miss is, and it is temporarily (i hope) missing in this version are (between others):

Ability to turn alerts off
History
Contact groups

The new version installation file is is 24.7 Mbyte big, compared to the 21.3 Mbyte of the previous 3.8 version.

What pisses me off, and this is not related to the new version, is that Josh Silverman, CEO of Skype, says in a video where he promotes the new version: “To our community of over 300 million users all around the world, thank you very much for your passion”.

Stop the bullshit marketing talk Josh! You DON’T have 300 million users, you have perhaps 35 million users, that is a big difference, see also my very recent blog post here. Shame on you!

Recognition - thank you Jaanus!

2008-06-17T22:24:00.006+02:00

In the beginning i collected Skype data out of personal interest to follow up the phenomenal growth of Skype. Later, i provided my data to Skype Journal, because it was fun to contribute to some discussions.

And, about two years ago i began to blog myself, for recognition. Indeed, you blog hoping that some people will read it.

Yesterday, another blogger made a reference to my blog. It happened several times in the past, but when it comes from the former main blogger and Skype Staff Jaanus Kase, this is indeed the kind of recognition i love! This means at least that some (former) Skype Staff acknowledge that my analysis is often correct!

He was telling the Skype and Firefox worlds yesterday that perhaps Skype has the world record of downloads in one single day, see his post here: Firefox 3 download day on June 17 …

My answer to his implicit question … The maximum number of Skype downloads in a 24 hours period was:

1.180.000 on November 4, 2006, or
2.700.000 on November 19, 2007.

This is based on my data samples. As it are samples, the Skype download record could even be higher. Only Skype can tell!

So, will Firefox break that record today? Perhaps they will do it!

One good point for Firefox compared to Skype: they release their 3.0 version as well for Windows, Mac OS as Linux. Skype Mac and Linux versions are always lagging behind the Windows version!

Skype User’s Holiday

2008-06-13T18:56:00.005+02:00

The beginning of the year begun very promising concerning the concurrent Skype users online. In a speed record of 42 days we passed from 11 million to 12 million people online at peak time.

As my regular readers know, there are some fluctuations, resulting in less people online at:

“GMT”-night
Weekends
National holidays of bigger Skype countries (USA, Brasil, UK, …)
Christmas and New Year Period
Northern Hemisphere Summer Period

The graph below represents my samples of concurrent people online since the early beginning of Skype, and it seems we are entering in summer recession.

The points marked 1, 2, 3 and 5 are the Northern Hemisphere summer periods of 2005 till 2008.

The vertical line “4” represents the huge outage of August last year.

The next “million milestone” will most probably not be reached before September. This is deceptive. Indeed, the promising “start of the year” mentioned above seems to have been a “one shot”.

All the new “features” added by Skype in the last months, including the number recognition launched some weeks ago were not spectacular enough to attract bunches of new users. This doesn't mean those features were not nice. I would even say the Skype client has improved in the last months: less bugs, more stability, better quality.

Skype continues to grow, this i am quite sure. But not at the same speed as their best year 2006, where almost 4 million “peak concurrent users” online were added! Let’s us meet in September again to witness the 13 million milestone.

Complaining again

2008-06-04T21:43:00.011+02:00

I already complained about it in the past, in "Respect my choice": i got an e-mail from Skype for one of my unused user accounts. My language settings for this account are those of the embedded image on the left: English!

The mail I got is …
French.

Why? Does Skype suppose there is only one language in Belgium? In fact we have three official languages, in proportional order: Dutch, French, German. And we have quite a lot of immigrants speaking Arabic, Turkish, English and other languages. Other countries also have several languages, like Switzerland, or even Estonia (some people speak Russian there) and United Stated (Spanish?).

The e-mail of Skype shows a complete lack of respect for their customers concerning language settings and choices! I personally don’t mind, but i assure you some fanatic or extremist people will leave Skype after such a mistake, and not only in Belgium!

Anyway, one good point: i tried to download the newest release of the Skype client, and this time the downloaded version was indeed the newest version.

300 million user ACCOUNTS

2008-06-04T21:18:00.005+02:00

Have a look at that quite interesting paper on why Google should invest in new acquisitions and why it should disinvest in Skype: Will eBay Go Shopping?.
But, when will Skype stop to claim it has 276 million users? It are more than 300 million user ACCOUNTS right now, not USERS, according to Skype.

I have 20 user accounts (some spare for family members) but i am only one user!

See why user is NOT the same as user account in some of my previous posts, and here in (if i remember) the first one: How many users does Skype have today? (April 2006), and see the estimate of real (or active) Skype users here: Borderless Communicator.

MeBeam 16 + Skype

2008-06-01T22:30:00.003+02:00

The Australian Ashod Apakian did it again. He is playing around with video conversations over the internet, and is a real freak! His first creations, in 2005, had the name WigiWigi. Nice name. And it was high quality video, never seen before. His new creation is called MeBeam. I tested it with two computers on my desk and another one downstairs with my youngest son.
Well great:

Video conferencing up to 16 persons
It is launched through Skype!
You don’t need to download anything, a FlashPlayer enabled webpage is enough!
And your videoconferencing contacts only have to click on a link in the Skype chat window!

The rest, well, read it here: Multi party video for Skype

Amazing!