January 29, 2007......... 9 Million Online today. Millennial hurdle surpassed in 84 days! So What.

We reached 9 million concurrent online users today, and a peak of 9.02 was reached at around 18 GMT. European, Middle Eastern, and African households were just logging onto their computers for an evening of web browsing and chatting. The last of the Americans, in Hawaii, had just arrived at work and now all of America including Canada and South America was logged in at work. These two groups comprise a large part of the Skype users population.

The problem is that the statistic lumps it all together. It doesn't tell us how much American usage there is or how much European usage there is. Indeed, it undercounts both groups. Far better to measure at 11 GMT (before the Americans get up), and at 20 GMT (after many of the Europeans have finished their Skyping for the evening).

As for the rate of growth, it is still exponential, which means there were more new users in the current period than in the last. The size of the exponent (the rate) is decreasing, but that was to be expected. Incidentally, a year ago we hit 4 million on October 20th and 5 million on January 23rd, a period including the same seasonality factors, but the count of days was 93, 10% slower than this year... a fact with little more than anecdotal value.

Please see my major paper on Skype Growth and several shorter articles as well.... all of which you can find on this blog.