A country called Skype

According to a recent post of VoIP-News, a new telephone country code for VoIP users will be created. The company called VoxBone, based in Brussels, Belgium, succeeded in obtaining that number. It means that you could call any VoIP number from a classic telephone line by dialing 833 plus the VoIP number of your contact. Read the whole story here: Creating A Country Called VoIP.
Surprisingly, they say “The goal is that if you call someone on Skype, you dial 883 plus their number”. But, Skype accounts are not numbers, it are alphanumeric user names. This would mean the user name would have to be translated to a number.

Interesting, because – if true - anyone could call my Skype account from any cellular or PSTN phone and reach me wherever i am online and running Skype.

This could mean a new boost in Skype users, and consequently perhaps a new boost in the “revenue generating” voicemail feature of Skype. Indeed, although the Skype client is free, and Skype to Skype calls alike, for the voicemail you have to pay a subscription fee.

Or will Skype sell the VoIP numbers corresponding to the Skype user names? This could also generate revenue, but i think it would be a strategic mistake to ask customers to pay for their number. Revenue will be generated anyway, because the article says: "The carriers will have to pay Voxbone to complete the calls, and Voxbone will share those revenues with the VoIP companies."

[EDITED] Vincent made the following comment: “That is almost the same as SkypeIN, which exists since many years.”
Yes, and no …
A SkypeIn number is "country dependent", and exists only for 21 countries! A “VoIP country” would be universal, no agreement needed between Skype and separate countries! Definitely an advantage, depending on the cost for calling the new country!

It seems that Skype already is preparing a flag for that new VoIP country! Two recently added hidden emoticons are and . The first one is the European Union flag: type (flag:eu) in your chat window, and the second one, well i guess you guess it … type (flag:ss) in the chat window!

World Online or asleep

You can find almost everything on internet. The information is probably not always reliable, but by comparing different sources, you can eliminate the scrap.

I made a search of world population by time zone, but no site did provide me with the complete picture. But, you can find many sites with population by country, and you can find sites with the population by regional and/or time zone in a specific country (Russia, Canada, Brasil, USA, and some others). Wikipedia is often a very good information source. I even found the information concerning some smaller islands.

Then i plotted the following graph: those countries and regions that are simultaneously living between “9:00 AM and 23:00 PM” or in other words the sum of people who are “awake”. See the green curve below (left scale).For instance: at 0 GMT, you have about 4 billion people awake at the same time (and a lot of Chinese people and other Asians), and at 15:30 GMT you have 6 billion people awake, in fact almost everybody, less the relatively scarcely populated Pacific Zone.

The blue curve (right scale) is the daily fluctuation of concurrent Skype users online in a typical day some months ago. The curves have similar shapes. But, the Asian peak is much higher in the world population chart (beware, scales are different!).

Why the difference? In Asia lesser people have access to Internet. This explains probably why the Skype “Asian peak” is proportionally much lower then the “People Awake” curve.

What if i had the internet users by time zone? Would that bring the curves closer to each other?

Well, i dug deeper, and found also data about the internet users by country, but “less” exploitable. I had to make for instance the “probably” false guess that the internet penetration in Russia is the same all over the whole country.

Here the graph …Almost the same shape as the previous one.

What if i had only the broadband users by country and region? Would that graph come closer the Skype graph? Pity, i didn’t find reliable complete data by country yet!

In memoriam: Russell Shaw

He was one of the best known bloggers in the Skype Blogosphere, and certainly a Skype believer.

I discovered through the Skype blogs that he died: Farewell Russell Shaw.

A pity … and we were reading each others blogs. He once gave me a very nice compliment, saying that my “numerology blog” was “a real useful obsession”.

My condolences to his family.

Group Chats

Ike [Skype Staff] and Tomi [Skype Beta Tester] pointed me to an interesting poll in the Skype forums (click here) about the usage of Group Chats.
In view of the number of votes, the graph is right now not statistically relevant. Moreover, the respondents are mainly very heavy Skype users (Staff, Super Users, Moderators), so it is quite biased. My guess is that most Skype users don’t use Group Chats at all!

But, Group Chats are useful, the same as conference calls, and perhaps even more. Just suppose you are working with some family members or colleagues on an event or a project …

• You can ask a question or make a comment concerning your project even if some or offline;
• Those who were offline can read the previous messages when they come back online, and add relevant information to the chat;
• Chat history and messages are saved, so you can dig in the story and evolution of the project or event preparation (to find back why “this”, or when “that”);
• Unlike a conference call, you don’t have to be all together available at the same moment.

The drawbacks are:

• Not everyone uses Skype (not all of my family members for instance);
• Quite a lot of the bigger companies block Skype, therefore it isn't used in a multi-company environment.

But, it is indeed a very useful feature!

Skype contributed to eBay!

According to eBay …
"Direct contribution consists of net revenues from external customers less direct costs. Direct costs include specific costs of net revenues, sales and marketing expenses, and general and administrative expenses over which segment managers have direct discretionary control …”.

The following graph shows the evolution of the contribution as well in US dollar as in euro (€) quarter per quarter:Skype had a 15% contribution compared to revenue in the last quarter, and 12% for the whole year. Not bad, not spectacular however. But Skype indeed contributed to the eBay revenue in 2007, and this for the first time!

Per registered user account this represents ONLY 0.06 US$ per user for the last quarter (as Skype says in its marketing communication), or per registered user account (as it mentions correctly in the explanation of the data). This is 0.18 US$ for the whole year (2007)!
If we correct this, and only take the estimated “active or real” user (see one of my previous posts here) this number is however quite different: 1.68 US$ or 1.18 € contribution per active user in 2007!

Thanks to Sascha Vitzthum, who made me “discover” this contribution number on the eBay websites.

The Oprah effect

A lot of fuss about Oprah Winfrey using Skype for a Webcast, just “google” it. But it probably explains why the downloads of the Skype client are showing a significant increase:

• Around 500 downloads per minute with occasional peaks of 750 in the last months
• Now (since the end of February) around 1000 downloads per minute, with occasional peaks of more than 1500.

Look at the slope of the picture below:

Will the Oprah fans remain Skype customers? Hopefully for Skype, but to be honest this will be mainly an American phenomenon: i didn’t know who she was before this campaign! And although i believe the Skype blog that there were registrants all over the world, i guess the proportion of non-US Americans is quite limited!
I am curious to see if this affects the growth of users online, but it is early to say something about it. What i know is that the increase of this last metric is very good since the beginning of the year!

And the new President is ...

Today, finally: EBay names Silverman chief executive of Skype.

And he presents himself on the Skype Blog: A few words from Skype's incoming CEO. Here some bits of his phrases:

• On March 24, I’ll step aboard
• one of the most rapidly-adopted technologies in human history
• With my wife and kids about to begin their adventure in Estonia
• I don’t yet have the right to expect your enthusiastic two thumbs up. But as we go further on this journey together, I plan to earn it.

And my comments on his blogpost:

• March 24? This means this is a well planned move
• Let Skype be modest: it isn’t a new technology (P2P existed, and phoning through the computer was already possible before with MSN for instance), therefore i restate: Skype is one of the most rapidly adopted software in recent history, and it will probably NOT enter human history like the boomerang or the steam machine!
• Aha, he moves with his family to Estonia … therefore headquarter stays in Europe!
• I like the last phrase: it seems he is modest, but he is ambitious, and has plans (or will still make them) for the long term.

Two more feelings i have:

• Probably Skype will not be sold in the near future (i am quite surprised, i thought it would).
• It is good to see a CEO make comments on the company blog, and apparently he plans to continue to do this: therefore, thumbs up!

Skype isn't my ship, i am not the captain, not even the crew, i am only a fairly happy passenger, but anyway ... welcome on board Josh!

Real Users

100 Billion Skype to Skype minutes, 276 million users: Marketing and Public Relation people like to throw with huge numbers, and Journalists love to pick them up.

Skype updated recently the metrics for the first number, and of course the result was raising the number (or was it cheating?). As Skype is Peer to Peer, they only can make guesses about the minutes served!

And, concerning the second number, they always omit to say it means "registered user accounts" (including unused and multiple accounts).

But, what about the real(-istic) numbers? Let us play around with the only number provided by the Skype Client, everybody can do the same, and perhaps publish in the comments here his own number.I have 187 Skype usernames in my contact list. Some of my friends have multiple user accounts, others are virtual friends (like “echo123”), others are not active Skypers anymore. Discounting these, i have 132 active contacts remaining. From these, 36 were online on Saturday, February 23 at 12:00 PM GMT+1. This is 27% of my contacts. At the same time there were 8.6 million people online according to my Skype client. Therefore [and here I make a non-scientifical guess], this number represents also 27% of all active Skype users. Extrapolating, there are about 31.5 million active Skype Users. Of course, my sample is quite small, therefore not statistically relevant. But, anyway, quite close to the “other guess” of Hudson Barton, who calculates 30,339,264 million users.

Thanks

[This post was edited]
Two known blogs on Skype picked up my previous post or the information in my blog and made some own changes or interpretations.

See Russel Shaw here: Skype call trend lines are changing: here’s what this means

And Skype Journal here: 12 Million Online - New Peak on 18 February 2008
Correction on one of these posts we did reach 12 million on Monday 18 February, not on Sunday 18 February.

And, thanks for the compliments Russel :-)

12 million in record time!

Yesterday Skype reached around 19h GMT 12 million concurrent users online, this for the first time ever. It went from 11 to 12 million in 42 days.This is an absolute speed record. The previous record million “speed” was 63 days in March 2006.

It is worth to notice that in the past the peaks were somewhere between 16h and 17h GMT. Now it occurs about two hours later. This shows a recent growth in the Americas. Or, in other words, they are catching up with the usage rate of the Europeans.

And when will Asia catch up? When it does, we should see lesser fluctuations of the number of concurrent users online between day and night, or at least a change in the patterns of the curve. If you want to see these daily fluctuations, make a jump at the very nice graphs of http://nyanyan.to.

Where is the new CEO?

It has been almost 5 months since Niklas Zennström stepped down as Skype CEO and was replaced “ad interim” by Michael van Swaaij.In the meantime, there were some rumours, and some facts:

• Google sniffing round Skype
• Whitman resigns as eBay CEO
• IMHO, no innovations anymore at Skype, no strategy changes, and still too many bugs and customer complaints
• eBay is about to sell Skype to Hutchison Whampoa

So, when will know where the ship is going? Remember only this …
eBay agreed that if, on or prior to March 31, 2008, eBay sells or transfers securities representing greater than 50% of the outstanding voting power of, or economic interest in, Skype (it) would pay up to an additional €138,411,300 … to the Earn Out Sellers.

Therefore, no official news before April 1st i guess. And i hope this will not be an April 1st joke!

Currency corrections

From the quarterly results published by eBay, we could conclude that

• the revenue of Skype grew by 76% year to year
• registered user accounts grew over the same period by “only” 61 %

Therefore we could conclude that the revenue per user account has been rising.

However, although it is owned by eBay, Skype is still a European company. 83% of the revenue comes from outside the United States!

All Europeans know that the US$ has lost an important part of its value the last years compared to the Euro. Or is it the other way around: the Euro has become stronger? See for instance the currency exchange rate charts on Yahoo.

In the graph below, the Skype revenue is plotted as well in € (euro) as in US$.
We clearly see that the growth in € is lower than the equivalent in US$. “Only” 58% € growth year to year. Still a very good increase!

Now, what about the revenue per “user account” in €?
In US$ it is rising, BUT … in € the revenue per “user account” shows a decreasing tendency!
Who told me some months ago on this blog: “there are lies, big lies, and statistics”? ;-)

Updated estimation of S2S min

eBay published its quarterly results. I therefore updated my personal tables to prepare some posts later on.

However, I noticed something weird in the Skype to Skype minutes …

The data in the red ellipse comes from the presentation of Quarter 3 2007 results.

The data below the red ellipse, comes from the current presentation published yesterday.
I looked several times to both tables, and they have the same legend. However eBay upgraded the number of minutes served by a very significant amount, quarter 3 2007 raising from 6.1 to 9.8 billion minutes served, this is a correction of the original data of more than 50%.

• Did they make a mistake and did they correct it?
• Did they improve their measuring algorithm, and did they do a backward calculation?
• Or did i miss something?

[edited:] I missed something, the slide says "Skype-to-Skype minutes are estimated; prior period amounts are updated to conform to current estimation methodology."

Note to Phil

Phil Wolff made some interesting remarks concerning “Presence” on Skype Journal and he asked me a question: [Note to Jean: how does this affect the number of simultaneous users online?].
It is evident that if every Skype User on earth had a permanent internet connection and an affordable device that he dares to leave “on” 24 hours a day, this would have a dramatic effect on “concurrent users online”. See also the review of such a device by Nafcom on his “crap blog” (his wording ;-) : Product Review: Ipevo SOLO.

If we could give these features right now to 50% of the World Wide Skype Users, the 24 hours graph would look like the green curve on the embedded graph. Or if we could provide this to EVERY Skype User, it would somehow look like the red curve. I use here the acceptable guess of Hudson Barton of 30 million “real users” as a maximum. (A "real" Skype user is approximately the same as a user whose presence is detected daily).

Some comments on this graph and the consequences of “permanent Skype connectivity”:

• The fluctuations in concurrent users online today (blue curve) are due to people switching off their computers (mainly at night), or using Skype “only when they need it”;
• Therefore, providing people with “permanent” devices, would smoothen the fluctuations (some people already leave their computers switched on) and would raise the number of concurrent users online as shown on the green and red curves of my graph;
  
• If this happened “today at once”, this would NOT raise “today” the number of "real users";
  
• A lot of people stick to their mobile phone or PSTN line because they want to be reachable 24 hours per day. Therefore, providing “permanent” or “mobile WIFI” devices, could, in the long run, boost the growth of Skype;
• More SkypeIn numbers in more countries would also boost the usage of permanent devices;
• And … more people permanently reachable would encourage other people to join the Skype users cloud (this is the contrary of a vicious circle!).

I don’t think that the “permanent” or “mobile” devices will have a huge impact on Skype users in 2008:

• They are still quite expensive (more than cheap mobile phones), and most people join Skype to have cheap communications, not to spend money on nice hardware devices.
• Besides the price of the device, there is another factor that has a negative impact, especially in Europe: due to all the justified hassle about energy consumption, depletion of petrol reserves, global warming, etc. people are reluctant to leave all their electricity consuming devices permanently on. Therefore, only those people who have Skype Devices as a complete replacement of mobile or PSTN phones will dare to leave them 24 hours on!

Australia loves Skype

I read the following on Special Broadcasting Service (SBS): Skype has up to 3 million registered users in Australia alone.

Of course they mean registered user accounts (see some of my previous posts).

Like i often did, even in the very recent past, let us assume the numbers are however correct, this would mean that:

• 1.2 % of the active Worldwide Skypers are from Australia
• 15 % of the population of Australia are Skypers
• 22 % of the “active” population of Australia are Skypers (discounting people older than 65 years, and younger than 15 years)
• 20 % of Australian internet users are Skypers.

As some people get angry when i doubt about the value of such numbers, i will not repeat my comments of previous posts ;-)

The guilty ?

Hudson Barton made on January 12 some quite emotional comments concerning my latest posts. Funny that he seems to omit to mention that, besides my non scientifically website visits analysis (and therefore indeed highly speculative, i agree), i made a reference to a statement of a Skype Director: We're nearing saturation on PCs he said!

Therefore, i made a speculation (yes, i am guilty, (grin) ) and lucky hazard made that a Skype Director confirmed my speculation. I never said that Skype downloads “reached a plateau”, as Hudson misquotes me. The graph below shows that downloads are indeed rising steadily!I agree that downloads on its own isn’t the right measure to evaluate the growth of Skype. It is however one of the tools or numbers i have to make some analysis together with the main one: concurrent users online (here we agree!). Hudson however pretends that “ "downloads" shows exponential growth”. Well, there i disagree completely. The first 6 months of 2007 showed a linear growth (a STRAIGHT red LINE = LINEAR growth, NOT exponential). The second half of 2007 was somehow erratic. Mainly linear, besides some surges due to promotions. The last two months show again a linear tendency (green “linear” line) with even a lower slope than before.

There is another reason why downloads “on its own” isn’t a measure of the Skype growth: it also depends on the rate of new releases: the last 6 months Skype released only 11 new Windows clients compared to 23 in the previous 6 months. And some people upgrade systematically (like i do!).

No doubt, Skype is still growing, but 2007 was a deceiving year! More about that in later blogposts.

Spain doubles users in 2007

I read the following in TelecomPaper: Skype doubles Spanish users in 2007; counts 4.8 mln.

As usual, let me correct this statement: they mean “registered user names”, not "registered users", and this isn't equal to "active users".

Like i do usually, let us assume the numbers are however correct, this would mean that:

• 1.8 % of the active Worldwide Skypers are from Spain
• 12 % of the population of Spain are Skypers
• 18 % of the “active” population of Spain are Skypers (discounting people older than 65 years, and younger than 15 years)
• 26 % of Spanish internet users are Skypers

Bear in mind that the second, third and fourth numbers above are very exaggerated. Reasons can be found in my previous post on Chinese data.

Saturation

In my last post i made the following guess (see below): there is almost a saturation of Skype users in rich countries, and this is the title of a paper of CNNMoney.com:
Skype Seeks New Revenue Source As PC Downloads Near Saturation. This was told by Manrique Brenes, Skype's director of hardware business development, to Dow Jones Newswires! Therefore he confirms my "Saturation Speculation"!

Focusing on the synergy between other kinds of hardware and Skype, could bring some revenue, but in the short term this will, in my humble opinion, not be very spectacular.

I still believe they should find a way to attract bigger multinationals: this would definitely boost the Skype usage.

Skype growth from … ???

I check sometimes the ranking of Skype website visits on Alexa. Interesting, because you can learn something out of it.First lesson: the ranking of Skype is going down steadily, and this could be again a clear sign of the stagnating popularity of Skype, or, of some degree of saturation. The peak in the ranking of August was due to the outage of the Skype P2P network.

But more interesting is the list of visiting countries: in the top 5, USA followed by some quite smaller non-English speaking countries, representing altogether only about 5% of the population of the USA. Why are they visiting so frequently Skype.com?

In Algeria, Skype is in position number 66 of the most visited sites (way after Google, Yahoo, Youtube, …) and in neighbouring Tunisia in position 114. So, again, why do the people there visit so often Skype … it isn’t a search engine, an entertainment or news site, or a games or porn site!

I checked Algeria by googling on “ADSL”, and saw that Algeria is now making a quite substantial effort in offering fast internet connections. Therefore i guess a lot of people are installing Skype right after they get their connection. Probably this is also what happens in Bulgaria, Czech Republic, and Slovakia.

Therefore, (and this is again speculation) there is already almost a saturation of Skype users in rich countries (where fast internet lines are very common), and growth is now coming from smaller emerging countries were they are now catching up with the penetration of high speed lines.

Skype Forum = real help

Some weeks ago, Bill Campbell, a Canadian of British Columbia, belonging to the last people who crossed the New Year (they are always late in British Columbia (grin) ) contacted me by chat. He is a Super User on the Skype Forum, and he was concerned about the huge drop in the number of visitors on the forum.

I was surprised, because i didn’t have the same feeling. Therefore i checked the numbers.

Well, he is somehow right …On the graph above you can see that since June 2006, the mean number of new topics posted on the Skype Forum was always above 80 per day. The last month it is however dropping quite steadily. But this could be a seasonal effect. I will follow it up.

However, the number of registered usernames on the forum is also dropping.253 new forum users per day in December 2007, and it has been as high as 389 in January 2007! This is probably also a signal of the slower growth of Skype last year!

Another interesting graph shows the mean number of replies per topic.This varies from 1 to more than 100, but the mean value is 4.5.

The Skype Forum is still the best place to get help if you experience a problem with Skype: most problems reported there get an answer from the many volunteers there, even payment problems! Skype Customer support is deceiving everybody by its very slow answers or … no answer at all!