Skype names by region

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:

1. Europe: 36%
2. APAC: 36%
3. RoW : 15%
4. 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:

1. Americas: 41%
2. Europe & Africa: 34%
3. 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!