Second great post of the week by James Enck on his blog. This time on the average minutes of use for Skype per day. By tracking the Skype ticker he has calculated they are currently averaging around 36 million minutes per day. It has been as high as 41 million and as low as 28 million this year.
You would expect a mid year dip, as the Northern hemisphere summer kicks in, but he rightly asks the question, with Skype passing 50 million registered names, why is the number of minutes is not climbing at a proportional rate.
Unfortunately, from the publicly available data we don't know the average daily usage per actual user. We have discussed here before, in the series on counting Skypeout users by country, the potential impact of multiple "free accounts" and so forth. Skype generally peaks at around 3 million users online, at the moment, during any given day. Throughout the day, of course, many of these users would undoubtedly be different people. Some would log on (and off) only for outgoing calls. So it is hard to get a handle on the average total number of unique users per day. For what its worth, working with a figure of 3 million users, equates to an average of about 12 minutes per user per day. Conceptually, it could be argued that the peak online figure is what should be used in any case. Average minutes of use per user in the mobile industry are not calculated by how many people switch on their phones but how many are capable of making calls. Neither, on the other hand, does it seem reasonable to use 50 million as the base of users in calculating average use.
It can be surmised that 12 minutes is the maximum average use per day for all individuals that were logged in on any recent day. If there were 6 million unique users per day, who logged on at different times, that would equate to 6 minutes per user per day and so on. So at least we have an upper bound figure.
It is then interesting to compare those figures to FCC data on average use of fixed and mobile phones. Why consider the USA? The main reason is because traditional US style flat rate pricing for the PSTN comes closest to Skype's pricing in many ways (free or inexpensive). Users of the PSTN still pay for service in the USA but their usage is not constrained by metered charges and this encourages greater use.
In the USA fixed lines were used, on average, for 71 minutes per day in 2001 (as measured by Dial Equipment Minutes). That has traditionally been higher than most parts of the world because of flat rate local calls and, at least what were once viewed as, inexpensive PSTN long distance rates. In the United States, mobile phones were used on average for just under 16 minutes per day in 2002 per subscriber. That figure has been steadily increasing with a trend towards large buckets of minutes (included for a flat rate), off-peak unmetered calls, long distance substitution etc. Average minutes of use for mobiles in the USA is far higher than Europe where the average is often less than a quarter of that amount.
It appears that average Skype use is closer to that for mobiles than fixed lines but still much lower than both when spread across all users. So are the majority of users just looking for a bypass technology for expensive international calls, bypass of international roaming charges for mobile serice and a bit of fun on weekends? Average use would suggest it is not yet an integral part of their telephony patterns compared to fixed and mobile usage. Something to reflect on as people try to calculate Skype's sale value, which Hop255 has argued is not in telephony but eyeballs.
