The growth seems to be quite exponential! Good! Another interesting thing, the amount of users on-line fluctuates during the day between a peak and half that number. For the time being this means the Users Online are peaking at 3 million users at about 15h30 GMT and 1.5 million at about 01h50 GMT. This fluctuation is probably linked to global world activity (people awake and working). I also noticed a decrease already on Friday, and definitely on Saturday and Sunday! These are the days off in many countries!

The second graph I follow is related to the Skype business. I noticed that the SkypeOut orders and other vouchers or purchases I made have a sequential number. Therefore I also plotted a graph with the total amount of Skype orders (thanks also to Bill Campbell who provided me also with his personal reorder numbers). Each dot represents an order.

Here the growth is also exponential! Good sign for the survival of Skype. Indeed they need money, at least to pay their personnel. My estimate is that the mean value of each order is 10 euro (or 13 US$). This means, if the extrapolation of the curve is right, that Skype will have an accumulated revenue of 100 million euro [corrected] around August 10 2005. I won't comment on the profitability: I have no data on their cost structure.

Let's go to the third graph: the number of downloads of the Skype software! Here comes the surprise: IT IS NOT EXPONENTIAL ANYMORE!

Until January 2005 inclusive it was quite exponential (see the first part of the curve)! An extrapolation would have shown that we would have today about 90 million downloads.
However, something happened: indeed there was a spectacular increase in the number of downloads from February 2005 on (some deals with other companies to include Skype in their products?). Skype has been downloaded 110 million times today!

Surprisingly, the second part of the curve is bending down, meaning that the exponential growth of downloads has stopped! Is Skype reaching its limits? I don't think so. First of all, the release of new versions of the software has slowed down, and this could be an explanation for the slowing down of the exponential growth (but there still is growth anyway!). Secondly, some new features are certainly coming: Skype for business, webcam, others? This will boost the popularity of Skype!

I don't want to speculate more on these curves. I hope some of you have other numbers to complement them?