In their earnings announcement yesterday, eBay provided some very interesting revenue figures for their recently acquired Skype division. eBay acquired Skype on October 14, 2005 and since that time, the Skype unit has had $24.9 million in revenues. At the end of Q4 2005, they reported 74.7 million registered Skype users. This really is tremendous growth. I did some digging around and came up with these data points for registered Skype users:
| Date | Registered Users (millions) | Source |
| 8/29/2003 | 0 | Wikipedia (History section) |
| 3/11/2005 | 29 | Wikipedia (History section) |
| 8/14/2005 | 50 | Skype Journal |
| 9/12/2005 | 54 | Skype |
| 10/25/2005 | 61 | Skype |
| 12/31/2005 | 75 | eBay (1/18/06 earnings report) |
Since August 2005 (5 months), that averages out to 178,000 new Skype users per
day! Below is a chart showing the growth since the first public beta
in August 2003:
Check out Om Malik’s blog for some interesting analysis on the Skype numbers.