Last week we reached for the first time 10 million concurrent Skype users online. Completely to my surprise, this week we went over 10.270.000 users online. This is an increase of 2.5% in one week!

Is the deal with MySpace already harvesting new Skype Users? Perhaps, because i noticed also an increase in the number of downloads of the Skype client! The download speed is twice as high as some weeks ago.

Below I published the updated graph of the evolution of users online since the beginning of Skype in August 2003 (my data samples).

Users online fluctuate during the day, week and months, but reach now sometimes 10 million users online, and never go below 4 million users online (see the two blue curves, representing "upper" and "lower" limits of users online over the last 4 years). Some reasons for the fluctuations are:

• At night some people log off;
• During the weekend, fewer people are online;
• Holiday periods (summer, New Year, other public holidays) are also "bad" for the online number.

Although the growth of users online has been strong the last two weeks, I still don’t believe we will reach the 11 million mark this year!

Jean Mercier keeps count at Skype Numerology.