If you thought Facebook, with its 400 million registered users was huge, then consider this : Skype has 560 million users and unlike on Facebook, these users are not to casually surf away. Instead a significantly big chunk of them actually pay money to make calls. That makes the business model so impressive.

Find below how the company’s Skype-to-Skype call volumes have increased over the years. While this is only the free part of the model, a fraction of these users graduate to pay and that is how this growth rate is significant.

Q3 ’06 : 7.5 Billion minutes
Q4 ’06 : 9.5 Billion minutes
Q1 ’07 : 10.9 Billion minutes
Q2 ’07 : 10.8 Billion minutes
Q3 ’07 : 9.8 Billion minutes
Q4 ’07 : 11.9 Billion minutes
Q1 ’08 : 14.2 Billion minutes
Q2 ’08 : 14.8 Billion minutes
Q3 ’08 : 16.0 Billion minutes
Q4 ’08 : 20.0 Billion minutes
Q1 ’09 : 23.6 Billion minutes
Q2 ’09 : 25.5 Billion minutes
Q3 ’09 : 27.7 Billion minutes
Q4 ’09 : 36.1 Billion minutes

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