Skypeworld

I haven't written about Skype for some time, probably to the relief of many, but today's eBay results release contains a couple of interesting things. Communications (Skype) revenues were $24.8m in the 78 days since deal close. This is an annual run-rate of $116m, which is respectable in light of the company's estimate of $60m for the whole of 2005 when the deal was announced. Also of interest is that Skype is broken out in geographic revenue segmentation - fully 87% of Skype revenues are generated outside the US. This in itself is interesting, as the last set of figures I had from the company in April 2005 showed the US at just over 9% of Skype users. US users may punch above their weight in terms of paid services on Skype, but Skype still overwhelmingly relies on the rest of the world for revenues, which is quite a contrast from eBay itself (55/45 US/international) and many of its peers.

On a separate note, as a faithful tracker of Skype traffic via the RSS feed, I have been dismayed by the disappearance of the "minutes served" data in recent weeks. I am curious as to whether this is a) a technical glitch b) sensitive data which has been withdrawn for competitive reasons, or c) data which the new management considered to be suspect.

UPDATE: On the conference call it emerged that Skype averaged 190k new sign-ups per day, of which 39k (20%) were from China.