Unlike fellow VoIP pioneer Vonage, eBay-owned Skype appears to be doing alright. eBay issued its Q1 07 earnings report this afternoon showing very strong growth in Skype’s registered user base and revenues, both of which more than doubled year-over-year. Skype’s registered user base jumped by 107% to 197 million, while revenues leaped by 123% to $79 million.
At this rate, Skype is on track to generate $400 million in revenue during 2007, assuming only modest growth in both registered users and revenue per registered user (although the more valuable metric, which is not readily available, is how many paid users Skype captures on a quarterly basis, given that the majority of registered users pay nothing for the service).
| Skype User, Revenue Stats (in mil.) | ||||
| Num. of Registered Users | Quarterly Change | Revenue | Rev/User | |
| Q104 | 4.1 | na | na | na |
| Q204 | 6.8 | 2.7 | na | na |
| Q304 | 11.5 | 4.7 | na | na |
| Q404 | 19.8 | 8.3 | na | na |
| Q105 | 32.9 | 13.1 | na | na |
| Q205 | 44.1 | 11.2 | na | na |
| Q305 | 54.0 | 9.9 | na | na |
| Q405 | 74.7 | 20.7 | na | na |
| Q106 | 94.6 | 19.9 | $ 35.20 | $ 0.37 |
| Q206 | 113.0 | 18.4 | $ 44.00 | $ 0.39 |
| Q306 | 136.0 | 23.0 | $ 50.00 | $ 0.37 |
| Q406 | 171.0 | 35.0 | $ 66.00 | $ 0.39 |
| Q107 | 196.0 | 25.0 | $ 79.00 | $ 0.40 |
| Source: Emerging Media Dynamics analysis of company data © 2007. | ||||
eBay overall is doing alright too. Fueled by growth in not only Skype, but also by growth in its hot electronics payment property PayPal, eBay’s revenues grew by a healthy 27% to $1.7 billion, and its profits jumped by 52% to $377 million, year-over-year.
Pumped by its good performance, eBay may in a shopping mood. Mike Arrington reports that the company has all but signed on the dotted line in a deal to buy web recommendation company StumbleUpon for at least $40 million.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:31 PM | Print | Comments (1)
Two Reuters reports splash a lot of cold water on the idea that the web 2.0 era has revolutionized either Internet usage or politics. The first, by Eric Auchard, recaps a study by Hitwise that basically shows how little true interaction exists with web 2.0 sites and services.
According to the study, released at O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Expo, only a very small fraction of Internet users actually participate in the interactions by actively contributing to the give-and-take inherent in web 2.0 sites. Only .16% of visitors to YouTube upload videos — everybody else is just watching.
Only two-tenths of a percent of visitors to Flickr upload photos. Oddly enough, Wikipedia draws more action, with 4.6% of all visits to that site resulting in edits to the online encyclopedia.
Still, most people are the cyber equivalent of couch potatoes.
The vast majority of visitors are the Internet equivalent of the television generation’s couch potatoes — voyeurs who like to watch rather than create, Tancer’s [Hitwise analyst Bill Tancer’s] statistics show.
Despite the low level of participation, web 2.0 sites are definitely booming. Visits to “web 2.0-style” sites has soared 688% over the past two years, according to the Hitwise data.
Politicians, it seems, are also facing an uphill battle in trying to spur two-way interactions through their web-based efforts, according to another Reuters article, penned by Peter Griffiths.
Although the article documents the tremendous rise in Internet-based politicking, the bottom-line seems to be the same: political conversations on the web are still monologues rather than the hoped-for dialogues.
But there is a sense it is mostly one-way traffic — from “them” to “us” and analysts say politicians need to expand their online ambitions towards interactivity and user-generated content.
When it comes to public officials, governments and candidates running for office, we’re mostly lurking, observing or passively viewing rather than discussing, providing feedback or signing up for things. Not much has fundamentally changed, or so it seems.
“User-generated content is driving the rhetoric of a new empowered citizenry but, in reality, you are left with the same choices you always had,” Australian academic Allison Orr wrote earlier this year.
Although these assessments seem on the mark — in reality most people are content to just passively cruise around the web — they do obscure one crucial reality. For those who do want to create content or interact with politicians via social networking, the basket of new web 2.0 applications make that possible for the first time.
That’s a huge leap forward in communications. And who knows? Once this era has morphed into whatever comes next, even the couch potatoes might be acclimated enough to pitch in now and again.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 12:30 PM | Print | Comments (0)Vonage has been a trainwreck for almost a year, starting around the time it went public. The VoIP provider’s botched IPO sparked massive lawsuits and customer defections. Subscriber growth has otherwise precipitously dropped and it looks like Vonage won’t survive its bone-crushing patent infringement lawsuit loss to Verizon.
Lost among the headlines regarding Vonage’s lawsuit loss to Verizon is the fact that the company is embroiled in three other infringement lawsuits — one filed by Sprint in October 2005, one filed by a small voice mail tech provider called Klausner Technologies in July 2006 and one filed by a VoIP tech provider called Web Telephony in March 2007. On top of that, Vonage is coping with those class-action lawsuits stemming from its IPO.
What’s left for Vonage? Well, the best exit for Vonage at this point is for a rival to purchase the company’s customer base. Rumors floated earlier this week that Sprint-Nextel might be in talks to do precisely that, but according to Business Week’s Olga Kharif, that’s probably not going to happen. Sprint Nextel is facing enough challenges without taking on Vonage’s woes, even if it could buy Vonage’s subscribers at bargain basement prices.
A more likely outcome is bankruptcy, the specter of which Vonage raised yesterday in its official 10-K filing with the SEC.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 10:16 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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