Fall-Winter-Summer growth

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 :-)

Skype User’s Holiday

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.

May 1st, less Skypers

May 1st was in quite a lot of countries a Holiday (Celebration of the Working Class, or Workers Day, or Labour Day, or whatever). My Dutch neighbours do not seem to have a working class, because they don’t celebrate it!

For people who know my number analysis this will of course not be a surprise, but when major countries have a day off (and on May 1st it were several major countries), the number of concurrent users online goes down compared to other days. The same is valid for Saturday and Sunday, see the red curve on the graph below, taken from the Japanese site nyanyan.to.

When you look closely at the Friday before the weekend, the number of online users is also lower than on Thursday, probably because some Muslim countries have their weekend.

Strange also: it seems the download servers for the Skype client were down for a 48 hours period mainly over the weekend, see the flat portion of the blue curve above.