by alec on October 20, 2006
EBay’s latest financials break out Skype statistics pretty clearly, and Skype Journal’s Jim Courteny has been digging through the entrails looking for insight. The net for me?
- Revenue growth is slowing, likely due to the free Skype-Out in North America campaign. It’s actually pretty dramatic.  42% growth in Q1, 26% in Q2, 13% in Q3. Will Q4 be flat?
- The company seems to be on track to hit 150 million subscribers by end of year, something which I predicted in May of this year.Â
- Subscriber growth has held at a constant 20%, despite the free campaign, the only difference being that growth in North America is 68% higher than what it was the prior quarter. The free Skype-Out campaign is only a limited success. It didn’t move the needle on overall subscriber acquisition rates at all, which means that the rate at which new subscribers are being acquired outside of North America is falling.
It don’t look pretty to me.
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by alec on October 20, 2006
I guess API’s don’t warrant press releases. This announcement attracted almost no coverage, except a lengthy piece from Om Malik. The news is simply this: AOL has now built a web API for the OpenAIM program, allowing presence to be queried and messages to be exchanged from a web page.
Esoteric, perhaps, but very important for developers. At iotum, we use presence APIs to populate the iotum Relevance Engine with availablity data. iotum is one the mashup applications that Om talks about in his piece. The biggest headache for us? Except for Skype, there have been no server-based presence APIs from any of the big IM companies. What that means for our customers is that they must install our client on every personal computer or device that they wish to use to signal presence changes to iotum.Â
OpenAIM for the Web is a huge step in the right direction. What we need next is a subscription mechanism, rather than a simple polling system.
