2010-08-10

Waw, improved numbers!

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!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Jean,

Thank you for the info. This was very helpful as I was writing my prospective clients how great it is a marketing tool.

I am a Realtor in Florida, speaking 4 languages with many clients abroad.
So if you have any news or ideas where I can improve my mktng, please let me know.

Thank you.

inna.snyder or

inna@innasnyder.com

Jean Mercier said...

Hmmm ...
Thanks for the comment Inna, but i really don't see the link between my blog (or this post) and your marketing needs.