7 minutes Skype calling time per day per user

Some days ago Skype proudly announced that their users spend a total amount of 2 billion minutes per day on Skype.

Some 2 months ago Skype told the world that there were more than 280 million active users each month, see a previous blog!

Using these two numbers, this means that the average daily time spend on Skype calls is 7 minutes per active user! A lot of them probably with video, therefore more enjoyable than an ordinary phone call!

55 million concurrent people online

So, again a million ”crossover”, 55 million people, simultaneously online, on Skype ! Nice! Last (Northern Hemisphere) school year we had 11 milestones like this! This was a record.

The vertical lines are NOT January 1 lines, but 20 of August lines. Why this choice? Because in (Northern Hemisphere) summer there is no apparent growth of concurrent users online. How many already this school year, in fact the 10th school year since the launch of Skype? Count for yourself or see the answer below the graph ...

14 million crossovers and end of June is still quite far away! Yes, the Skype user base is still growing!

Some recent numbers

This blog is about numbers, therefore, even if it is only « copy-paste » i publish what I find, sometimes with comments or own graphs, sometimes without …

On the Skype blog they wrote: “more than 280 million people choose Skype to connect with their loved ones and colleagues every month.”

And then there was also Telegeography:

“International Skype-to-Skype traffic grew 44 percent in 2012 to 167 billion minutes”

Download speed of Skype client accelerating!

If the RSS feed of Skype provides correct numbers (and I don’t doubt about it!) we will see in the next days a serious increase of concurrent Skype users online! Indeed, the last days the number of downloads of the Skype client has a main speed of 4200 downloads per minute, and I even saw a speed of 6375 downloads/minute, never saw such a high speed before! (I don’t monitor on a continuous basis, therefore there probably were even higher download speeds!)

Exciting times ahead :-)

50 million concurrent users online !

Today, Skype crossed the 49 million AND the 50 million marks of concurrent users online !

More mobile devices, the MSN integration and the let’s not forget the natural growth of users worldwide!

This means that one out of each 140 people in the World was online at the same moment (if we forget multiple accounts of one user – I had two running!).

On September 5, 2003 there were "only" 44,444 people online at some moment of that day (I don’t have the hour)!

Where will it stop?

And, 48 million people online today!

Yesterday, a Sunday, 47 million, and more than 48 million people online today. So, this means something is happening.

Steve Schoen, from Hawaii, and one of my most regular readers thinks that two factors could explain this sudden "online users" surge:

• Skype 6.1 for Windows Integrates with Outlook
• Skype 6.1 for Mac Allows Browser-based Calling

Both announcements were made on January 10 on the Skype Blogs!

47 million on a Sunday, first time ever!

It never happened before that Skype crossed a million milestone on a Sunday, but it happened today:

47 million people online at about 18h GMT, thanks to Steven Schoen from Honolulu – Hawaii who warned me!

On weekends Skype usually doesn’t break records. Million Milestones were never crossed on a Friday (Muslim weekend), Saturday or Sunday (Christian weekend), and now for the first time ever a Sunday, strange, almost funny!

And Happy New Year to all my readers!

Higher speed of downloads of Skype client

Is the integration of MSN and Skype finally showing up in the number of Skype downloads, or is it the –according to Skype – massive download of Skype for iPhone and iPad? See their blog here:
“Skype for iPhone and iPad Hits over 120 Million Downloads and Releases New Versions”.

In my opinion it is more the MSN-Skype merge. The download graph show clearly a bend around November 20, with download speeds as high as 5000 clients/minute, instead of the 2000 /minute at other moments!

46 million people online

New million crossed: 46 million concurrent users online, thanks to Steve from Hawaii to warn me!

Skype and MSN merge

Skype announced some days ago that it will integrate MSN and Skype. In fact, from what I understand, MSN will disappear and be swallowed by Skype. I would have expected an acceleration of downloads of the Skype client (and of users online), but to my surprise … nothing yet! See the graph below.

Why? Well, first, the migration to Skype is still not mandatory! Secondly, and this is a guess, some functionalities will be lost, and probably some MSN users are reluctant to move now, see the questions and answers here.

But there is hope! One of the questions is “Can I show up as offline to specific contacts?” and the answer is “You can’t yet hide from individual contacts.” The “yet” is revealing that they are working on it! This is an old “desire” of quite a lot of Skype users, read their forum!

45 million people online

We reached 44 million concurrent Skype users online on September 17, but I was too busy and didn't blog.
Today my "warning mate Steve" from Hawaii warned me that we reached 45 million some minutes ago! Indeed!

More and more people are active on the internet, but there are also more and more people that are permanently connected through mobile devices (not my case yet)! I guess these are the two main reasons for the growth of Skype concurrent users online

43 million

According to one of my blog readers, we reached 43 million concurrent users online today.

Thanks, Steve Schoen, from Hawai.

He said
"I think the surge in usage is somehow school-related".

 He is probably right!

42 million people online

Skype is indeed still growing: 42 concurrent million people online! But, when will Microsoft allow Skype to publish some more numbers?

• users per country?
• minutes called per continent?
• revenue per paying user?
• total sales?

Tip of the day: free screen sharing with Skype!

When you are in a video call and you want to share a screen you get the following message: "You need Skype Premium to share screens", and … you can have a free 7 days trial or buy Skype Premium at once. But, the following phrase made me curious: “Sharing screens on a video call or a group call is available as part of Skype Premium”. Implicitly, this means that when you are in a normal one to one Skype to Skype voice call WITHOUT VIDEO you still have free screen sharing. I tried it, here is the result …

No more pop up screen inviting you to pay for Skype Premium, and while calling the other person you still can see HIS (or HER) video! But he or she can’t see you. Therefore, screen sharing is still free! But Skype doesn’t tell you this in the pop-up screen, of course, business is business!
I tested this with version 5.9.0.114 for Windows.

41 million people online!

Today, we reached more than 41.5 million concurrent users online.

Probably still related to the Skype for Windows Phone app, that went out of "beta", the new 1.0 version was released!

This is the most phenomenal growth period of the Skype history!

Skype fast growth and Skype for Windows Phone app

It is very evident that we have the fastest period ever in Skype growth, after many months of stagnation, almost 300 days! (See also my post of December 26, Stuck @ 30 million). Thereafter we reached slowly the 31 million people online half January!

And then came the end of February with the release of the Skype for Windows Phone app …

In some weeks we went from 31 million concurrent people online to (yesterday Monday April 10, 2012) 40 million concurrent users online. Very interesting to note also that the 40 million milestone was reached on a day that was a Holiday in quite some countries. As my blog reader Raffaele D'Abrusco correctly noticed, usually there is a drop of concurrent users online when big countries have a Holiday! Well, to be honest, we had also some "record" days on a Sunday the last weeks, same reasoning … quite unusual if we compare with the past history!

And indeed, when we look at the download curve of Skype clients, we see clearly a bent in the download speed from the end of February on, exactly at the moment of the Skype for Windows Phone app release, see graph below!When will this stop? At the "Summer recession"?

40 million people online today

Not much time to blog more today, but, yes, the growth of Skype users goes on!

1 out of each 177 earth inhabitants online !

38 and 39 million people online today !

Quite amazing growth the last weeks. In less than one month Skype added 6 million concurrent people online! Never seen such a growth!
As Steve Schoen from Hawaii noticed, with a world population of 7,003,003,370 this means that 1 out of 177 people on this planet was running a Skype client on his computer or mobile device (with 39.5 million people online some minutes ago!). Of course, some are running more than one account at the same time, like I often do, but I guess this is a minority!

And it goes on ... 37 million

37.545.575 users online some minutes ago, amazing growth!

In two weeks 5 million milestone crossings: never happened before! Last year, March 28, we were at 30 million, and then nothing for the rest of the year! I complained about it! And since January we added 7 millions!

Amazing, amazing!

36 Million

Some minutes ago I saw (18:30 GMT) I saw 36.1 million people online on my Skype client ... NOT on the RSS Skype feed (35.871.682 there).

I was mentally too late for the screenshot, a pity!

Growth is going on ... :-)

35 million WAW

And it goes fast the last two weeks:
Some minutes ago it was already 35.9 million concurrent users online according to my Skype client.

Download speed of the Skype clients is also quite high: 2500 downloads per minute, not the highest I have seen, but much higher than usual.

Therefore: 36 million concurrent users online today (then I will adapt my post) or tomorrow?

33 AND 34 million the same day!

Skype hit 33 million concurrent users online today, and later on 34 million (around 18:15 GMT), only 4 days after the previous million milestone. This was fast, the fastest time of Skype history, see the table on the left, 3 million crossovers in 4 days, and two the same day!

One possible reason for this increased growth could be this:

Skype for Windows Phone App Released in Beta.

Amazing, because this Northern Hemisphere School Year was rather a deception until some weeks ago!

And thanks to Steve Schoen from Hawaii who warned me by e-mail about these two supplementary milestones!

Aloha :-)

32 million

I saw for the first time 32 million simultaneous people online today, through the Skype RSS feed!

Was it the first time today? I am almost sure, but not completely, because my major and most favorite source, the Japanese site nyanyan.to doesn't show the online number graph anymore, and this is a pity!

Skype calling minutes in 2011

Steve Ballmer from Skype (or is he from another company ;-) told the World that there were 300 billion minutes of Skype calls in 2011.
I added the data to my “historical” graph.

He doesn’t say however if it are only Skype-to-Skype calls like my graph suggests

He also speaks about 200 million people who used Skype in 2011. The last number is probably still an exaggeration compared to the actual real users (some people test Skype and never use it again) but a much better indication than the number of “user accounts” that Skype used to publicize in the past calling it “users”!

Passed: 31 million milestone

Finally, after 294 days, Skype crossed again a “million milestone” of concurrent users online: 31 million today, and even 31.545.425 million some minutes ago (at 17:50 GMT*), data captured through the Skype RSS** feeds.

The 294 days waiting time, is the longest period ever between two million milestones, excluding the first million that took 418 days!

At least, some growth again!

*GMT: Greenwich Mean Time
**RSS: RDF Site Summary

Stuck @ 30 million!

The year ends with a Skype disappointment for me, but let's remind first about some numbers and facts all provided by Skype itself, mostly in October:

• Skype is now Microsoft
• Integration of Skype & FaceBook
• 300 million minutes of video calls per day
• 700 million minutes of free calls per day
• 65 million people sign in every day

The last number is interesting, because this gives an idea about how many real Skype users there are in the world.

But, there is also « bad » news : for the first time ever since 2004 Skype didn't cross a « million milestone » of users online in the period September to December. In May Skype crossed the 30 million simultaneous people online, and it got stuck around that number ! I don't understand why ...
Graph from the Japanese site « http://skmap.gatagata.jp/ ».

Worries

What happens with Skype? The last weeks there is a strange behavior with the downloads. Sometimes, during hours, often half a day to more than one day (see the blue curve) it gets like stuck! The mean number of downloads was as low as 270 per minute, while usually it is around 2000 downloads per minute. Is it because they were working on a new version?
Anyway, there is some other reason for concern. End of March we reached the record of 30 million concurrent users online (people being online at the same moment). Every Northern Hemisphere summer there is a decrease of concurrent users online, perhaps because people spend less time in front of the stupid computer screen, and drink a beer in their garden (or other similar reasons, like Holidays).
But, it is now October 1, and still no new record (see the red curve). Should we be worried? Perhaps not. It happened also last year, and in 2007.
A reason for the “not growing online people” could be version 5.5 of the Windows client! The Skype window itself and the Skype home popped up when starting Skype: I know several people who switched Skype off because of this irritating behavior.
I downloaded version 5.6 yesterday, and hurrah, Skypes starts in a “friendly” way again, with only its characteristic whizzing sound.
(The graph above comes from the fantastic Japanese site @ http://nyanyan.to)

The link between outage and more downloads

Skype is down again, and this happens too often the last years.
But the funny thing is, at the same time the number of downloads of the Skype application raises tremendously. See the dramatic drop down of the users online on the red curve, and the very visible bent in the blue download curve. Why could this be?
I think that a lot of people thought that the Skype problem was their computer or Skype client crashing. Therefore they tried to install a new version, probably to no avail!

The days after Microsoft

It was big news on May 10: Skype bought for 8.5 billion dollar by Microsoft. Most comments (72% of 187) of Skype users on the Skype Blog were negative or worried: anger, sorrow, fear, ...
The funniest comment was “That's great, how do I delete my account?”!

But the announcement had one very positive effect, see the graph below ...
Before May 12, the speed of downloads was about 700/minute (see the blue curve from the Japanese site nyanyan.to). Then, during a period of about 24 hours there has apparently been some kind of a problem: the downloads stopped! Was there a bug in the download counter or did the downloadservers go down?

And then, after Friday the 13th there were massive amounts of downloads. Skype was downloaded at speeds of 3500 per minute!

It seems that a lot of people suddenly heard for the first time of their lives about Skype!

(The red curve is the daily or nightly fluctuation of Skype users online).

From my Flemish Financial Newspaper

Translated from Dutch:

I bought Skype!
But I don’t call any longer, because it costs money!

from De Tijd, May 11, 2011