2006-11-08

8.000.000 online!

Today we reached, two days later than my prediction of September 9, 8 million concurrent users online.

(screenshot taken from www.nyanyan.to)
I am disappointed, not only because of my wrong prediction ;-) , but much more because i had hoped that we would reach the 8 million much earlier.

Herewith the updated table with “million milestones” and in the third column the number of days between each milestone:
Prediction for the 9 million concurrent users online: January 9! But i hope we will reach it before Christmas!

10 comments:

ONLYEBAY said...

Great analysis. The next prediction is very difficult because the xmas holiday interferes with any growth rate estimates. I think you are right that it won't be until people come back from holidays in the first two weeks of January that we will reach 9 million. we will see

Jean Mercier said...

Yes, holidays are always showing a slowdown! Also last year "end of year" period!

Anonymous said...

Looks like a significant slowdown in growth is gripping Skype. Nine million concurrent users should have been reached by now. The way things are looking, we may not even hit it in January at all. hmmmm.

Jean Mercier said...

I am almost sure we will hit it in January, but indeed the speed of growth is down!

But you are right, it "may be in February" and hmmmmm!

Anonymous said...

We will hit 9 million on Monday 29 January. Close call but it will be January. Still, the question remains why is this number going up so slowly relative to the downloads and total users? hmmmmmm part two.

Jean Mercier said...

I am indeed convinced we will hit it on Monday ... but quite late.

There is however growth in the Americas, but it isn't reflected yet in the peak moment of users online.

Anonymous said...

I was just thinking today - as Skype reaches 9 million - that there is one feature that would make the concurrent user list skyrocket overnight. If Skype finally lets users easily have two (or more) Skype accounts open on one computer, thousands of people that have more than one account would automatically count as two (or more) concurrent users. I know there are ways to have multiple sessions now but they are complicated (at least to the average user). You think Skype will introduce this feature?

Jean Mercier said...

Multiple accounts running on one computer isn't that difficult, even for the average user, if you have more then one account on your Windows system!

Just right click your Skype client, and choose the option "run as" where you can type another user name and password. Both are visible in the Skype account from which you initiated the trick!

I don't know if it is possible with a Macintosh computer :-(

Anonymous said...

I guess my point is that this 'trick' is a workaround and not an 'official' Skype feature. Most people don't know about it and even some that do (like me) don't want to setup another Windows account for the sole purpose of running a second Skype instance. Perhaps 'complicated' was the wrong word and I should have said 'not seamless'. This is just my opinion but if there are other people that think like me (and I hope I am not alone on this one) then we should see a jump in concurrent users the day you can activate multiple accounts from within Skype.

Jean Mercier said...

In fact you are right:
1. the trick isn't that easy anyway
2. indeed, not everybody wants to have multiple accounts
3. It would be a nice feature to be able to activate multiple accounts, that would indeed provoke a jump forward of users online

I have now two computers running, each with two accounts, one of them also runs my excel macro to capture the 9 million users online in it, and on the other one i also look at the Japanese site.

I hope to be the first to blog on the 9 million users online, and i hope it is today, because tomorrow i am not home!

;-)