Jamie's Random Musings
Various thoughts and adventures, including but not limited to Linux, Windows XP and Widows Vista, and assorted bits of hardware new and old.
Wednesday 18 June 2008, 8:35 AM
Skype 4.0 beta - STILL No Multi-Party Video
As for the press release itself, it is obvious from the fact that every news site which ran it includes the exact same text that Skype is intentionally distributing the same old misleading information about having "309 million registered users". This number is, of course, patently ridiculous; it is the number of user accounts, not the number of registered users. It is vastly inflated by two factors:
- Once a Skype account is created, it can never be deleted. Ever. The only thing you can do is erase your personal information, and leave the account dormant. So the silly "309 million" number includes every Skype account that has ever been created, regardless of the actual status of the account. Does this constitute "registered users" in anyone's opinion other than Skype Marketing?
- A very large percentage of those accounts are created by the spammers and pornographers who infest Skype space. They create hundreds or thousands of new Skype accounts daily, use them for a short time, and then abandon them in order to avoid being blocked or traced. Detailed instructions on how to do this were posted not long ago by the Skype Cheerleading Squad (aka The Skype Journal), by the way. Do these accounts constitute "registered users"?
The real number of Skype "users" is probably somewhere around 10% of the ridiculous number that Skype Marketing insists on including in their misleading press releases. They are well aware of that, and it has been pointed out to them many times, most recently in the Skype Numerology Blog, for example. But that doesn't stop them, of course.
jw 18/6/2008
PreviousComments on this post
Actually for the argument sake, number of users reported by any internet company is based on the number of registered accounts. Its the same for goog gmail accounts for example, the same user/spammer has well over 100 gmail accounts. And facebook as well, ebay, myspace... Its not so straight forward to track account activity and number of accounts per unique user in any of this. So, everyone uses number of registered accounts as a baseline.
Very true. Registered users also is not a good figure to see how well the product is doing. Take for example a typical forum site, you can see there are like 10k users or something but in reality some of those are duplicate accounts, spammer accounts or just plain spambots. The actual number of forum users is about 25 percent and the regulars is only 10 percent or below.
Also Skype's customer support or the lack thereof makes it very frustrating to subscribe to their paid service like what I've experienced last year and made me looked somewhere else and found Onesuite (for my regular long distance calls) Yahoo voice (for my PC to PC calls and chat) and MagicJack (for my back up)
Agreed. The strange thing about this is that the vast majority of people understand quite well that the "309 million registered users" number is ludicrous, whereas quoting some more realistic numbers, say "more than 30 million regular users" (they could easily determine a reasonably accurate number for that), or "typically 10+ million active users" would sound at least as impressive, much more believable, and wouldn't make them look silly by intentionally quoting a number that they know is bogus. But it is obvious that they have made a corporate decision to push this misleading number, because it is now included in every single press release they make, and every time anyone from Skype gets interviewed, they parrot the same number.
