Soon more numbers

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

Only two comments:

1. They soon WILL HAVE to provide more numbers.
2. 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!

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

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?

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 ...

[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!

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!

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

RSS number feeds Skype are working

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

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

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!

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?

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?

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

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!

Satisfaction of the new Skype 4.0

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 :-(

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?

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:

1. They forgot their password and created a new account
2. Somebody stole their account (Yes, this can happen!)
3. They created a new account because they wanted to get rid of some of their annoying contacts
4. They have a work account, a home account, a desktop account, a laptop account, etc.
5. They are professional spammers and create several hundreds or thousands accounts
6. They have a primary account and one or more test accounts
7. 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?

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?

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

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?

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?

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

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

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!

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!!!

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:

1. probably this concerns only Windows users (not Mac or Linux or others!);
2. some people like myself already installed the updates without waiting for Skype;
3. 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!