47+ Skype Statistics (2024) +++ Users, Downloads and More

Report Highlights:

Professionals use Skype and other video platforms for 3 hours and 12 minutes per week on average.
Combined, people participate in 3 billion minutes of video calls on Skype daily.
There were 4 billion registered Skype users in 2019.
Skype has over 300 million monthly active users.
More than 40 million people use Skype daily.
The video conferencing market is predicted to pass $75 billion before 2027.
Most (89%) remote workers say Skype and similar platforms help them connect with colleagues.
About 86.5% of employees used video calls for work in 2021.
Only 13% of traffic to Skype.com comes from the US.
Over half (51%) of Skype users make more than $100,000 per year.

Also check out these statistics: Bereal Users, Mastodon Statistics and OpenAI users.

Skype Users

One of the most important categories to consider is Skype users, specifically how and where they use the program.

Younger users tend to use their mobile devices, and older users prefer the computer, and the US has the highest percentage of active users of Skype.

About 29% of adults 18 to 29 years old use Skype on their smartphones.
Only 12% of smartphone users over 60 years old use Skype on their mobile devices.
Roughly 27% of people between 30 and 59 use their smartphone for Skype calls.
One-fourth (25%) of millennials outside of China use Skype.
Despite making up a small percentage of all traffic, 49% of monthly active users (32 million) are in the US.
Nine countries have at least 1 million Skype users (US, UK, India, Canada, Australia, France, China, Brazil, and Germany).
With 1.4 million active users, France is the country with the most Skype users where English isn’t the primary language.
Skype is projected to reach 2.1 billion users in 2023 and 2.27 billion users in 2024.
Traffic to the Skype website dropped by 3.8 million between September 2021 and February 2022.
That decline from 37.8 to 34 million monthly visits equates to a decrease of just over 10%.
Skype users have spent about 2 trillion minutes on Skype calls as of October 2017.
As of 2018, about 42% of men 18 and older used Skype.
The same year, roughly 32% of adult women used Skype.
In 2012, the average Skype call was only 13 minutes long.
Only 7.5% of all registered Skype users use it at least monthly.
About 99% of all Skype users use the app less than once per day.

Skype Demographics

Some user-related statistics have to do with specific demographic categories, such as age, gender, and income.

While some of these statistics are older, many of them follow trends and so are probably somewhat accurate even today, but the pandemic has changed some things.

In 2012, one-third (33%) of all Skype users had a college education.
About 54% of all Skype users in 2012 were female.
The same report found that 52.8% of Skype users were married, and 45.8% of all users had kids.
Almost two-thirds (65.8%) of Skype users in 2012 were 18 to 49 years old.
Just over three-fifths (61%) of users earned at least $50,000 in household income in 2012.
Before the pandemic, in January 2018, 62% of Americans surveyed said they never used Skype.
Only 9% of people said in that survey that they used Skype at least once a day.
An additional 8% said they used the program at least once a week but not daily.
In January 2018, 51% of adults 18 to 24 used Skype.
About 52% of adults 25 to 34 used the program that month.
Adults over 75 used Skype the least in January 2018, at only 16%.
Americans who made less than $30,000 in 2018 used Skype the least, with only 26% of them being active users.
The percentage of people using Skype slowly increases by income bracket, with 51% of people that earn six figures using Skype in early 2018.
About 15 million people that earn $100,000 or more in the US use Skype regularly.

Skype Business Use

Skype for Business was a popular option from 2014 to 2021, but Microsoft retired it in favor of Microsoft Teams.

However, many businesses from IT to hospitality still use Skype, even if they can’t use a business-specific plan to host video calls.

Skype has 8.6 million active users that work in the computer software industry.
Another 6.3 million active users work in information technology.
Surprisingly, 1.62 million active users come from the retail industry.
About 2.7 million people in the education management space use Skype.
In the hospitality industry, about 2.6 million workers use Skype.
Skype receives an additional 2.1 million users from higher education.
Around 1.7 million marketing and advertising employees use the communication program.
The financial services industry provides another 1.67 million regular active users.
Non-government organization (NGO) management accounts for another 1.5 million active users.
Roughly 1.3 million construction workers use Skype.
Over 52,900 companies use Skype for work.
One of the largest companies that uses Skype is The North Face.
About 45% of all companies that use Skype have between 50 and 1,000 employees.
Another 34% of companies that use Skype have less than 50 employees.
Two-thirds (67%) of companies that use Skype make less than $50 million in revenue.
An additional 9% of companies that use Skype make $50 million to $1 billion in revenue.
Workers that use Skype spend about 38.4 minutes on video calls per workday.

Skype Use Worldwide

The US may be home to a huge chunk of users, but there are plenty of people in other countries that use Skype.

Sadly for some people, their country’s government restricts Skype usage or completely blocks the service, but worldwide usage is still increasing each year.

Despite the recent explosion of Zoom, Skype still had a large video conference market share at 32.4% in 2020.
Within a year, Skype’s market share dropped to only 6%.
Roughly 87% of all website traffic to Skype.com comes from outside of the US.
The United States has the largest percentage of Skype.com visitors with India in second place at 7%.
Another 10% of Skype’s website traffic comes from Brazil and Russia (each sends 5% of traffic).
Skype’s website is number 3,100 in the US and 1,911 in the world.
Demand for Skype increased by about 70% after the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Users have spent about 120% more time video conferencing since before the pandemic.
A Skype call that lasts for an hour uses about 225 MB of data, 86.5% of the data a Facebook Messenger call would use.
Skype’s peak usage occurs at noon Central US Time, and the entire business workday gets a lot of use.
Dallas, TX, is the city that uses Skype the most.
In March 2020, Skype calling minutes increased by 220% compared to February.
About 10% of all Skype users are from the United Kingdom.
Skype is banned in countries such as Brazil, Belize, and Venezuela, among other Central and South American countries.
China and some Middle Eastern nations may not ban Skype, but they monitor it and have some restrictions on the service.

Skype Downloads

Many people use the mobile app on their iPhone or Android, but others prefer to use the desktop app for the larger screen.

Consider some statistics related to the various Skype apps that you can use, from the number of downloads to how much storage space you’ll need.

In 2016, the Skype app hit over 1 billion downloads on Android.
Skype receives an average of about 1 million monthly downloads on Android devices.
As of October 2022, Skype is the 18th most popular app in the social networking category on iOS.
On Android, Skype is the 8th highest-grossing app in the communication category.
The Skype app for Microsoft is available in 103 languages.
Skype takes up about 144.5 MB of storage on an iOS device.

Skype Revenue

Unfortunately, Microsoft is secretive about how much revenue it generates specifically from Skype, but some numbers are available to the public.

Consider how much money Skype has earned throughout the years and how that has grown.

Skype has lost at least $85 million to “Zoombombing,” which is the act of people hacking into video calls.
In September 2022, Skype earned $2 million from iOS users and $700,000 from Android users.
As of 2022, Skype’s value is between $10 billion and $12 billion.
Skype only profited $361 million in 2016, only 16.4% of the $2.2 billion in revenue that year.
While you can use Skype for free, paying for extra minutes will cost you $0.10 per minute.
Skype makes its money by charging users to call others who don’t have Skype accounts and through monthly subscriptions.
Microsoft charges $13.99 per month for the World Subscription plan that allows for international calls.
Domestic calling plans range from $2.99 to $11.99 per month, depending on the country.
Users can also purchase credits as they go for $5, $10, or $25 at a time.
The latest public Skype revenue report comes from 2010.
In 2010, Skype’s revenue amounted to $859.82 million.
Across five rounds, Skype raised almost $77 million.
In the fourth quarter of the fiscal year 2022, Microsoft earned $51.9 billion in revenue across all of its services (including Skype).
Microsoft’s revenue that quarter was up 12% (or 16% if you use constant currency).
The entire video conferencing market hit $15 billion in 2020.
When Skype went public in 2010, the average paying member spent $96 per year $8 per year) on the service.
Also in 2010, Skype made $406.2 million in revenue, which averages out to 2.3 cents per minute across free and paying users.
Skype lost $5.8 million in 2009 due to having to pay back credit card companies for fraudulent transactions.

Skype History

Skype is one of the oldest video calling apps, and it’s gone through a lot of changes in the past 19 years, from multiple acquisitions to reaching new revenue and user milestones.

Consider how Skype got its start, the changes that have occurred since then, and how all of these statistics have made the company what it is today.

The founders of Skype first launched the company in 2003.
Two people founded Skype in Europe.
Only one-on-one video calls were available until 2010.
Skype amassed 8 million paying members and 120 million total users by the end of 2010.
Microsoft paid $8.5 billion to buy Skype in 2011.
If Microsoft were to buy Skype today, it would have to pay over $11.2 billion when you account for inflation.
In 2021, Microsoft replaced Skype for Business with Microsoft Teams.
Because of that replacement, Skype no longer has plans especially for businesses.
Before Microsoft bought Skype, eBay bought it for $2.6 billion in October 2005.
Skype was the first VoIP service to offer calls for free.
As of 2022, Skype has acquired three businesses: GroupMe, Qik, and Sonorit.
Skype has received three investments and has faced three exits.
The number of Skype users more than doubled from 760 million to 1.95 billion since Microsoft bought it.
On average, Skype has gained about 108.18 million users per year.
Skype saw its largest increase in registered users in 2022, with an additional 150 million users.
The company hit over 1 billion users in 2014.
Back in 2010, only 40% of Skype calls were video calls.

Skype Competitors

A decade ago, most people would have chosen Skype in a heartbeat for video calls, but a lot can change in a few years with new competitors on the scene.

While video conferencing has grown overall since the COVID-19 pandemic, many users are starting to prefer Zoom or other Skype competitors, so much so that Skype’s market share dropped significantly in the past couple of years.

In 2020, Skype held 6% more of the market share than the second-place competitor, Zoom.
Skype video calls can hold 100 people, only 10% of Zoom’s maximum of 1,000.
Users can host Skype calls for free for up to 24 hours compared to only 40 minutes with Zoom.
In the business world, Skype only has a 13.48% market share.
Skype is third after Zoom and Adobe Connect when it comes to business use of video conferencing apps.
About 47.6 of American adults use FaceTime for video calls.
Skype is compatible with more operating systems than almost any other video conferencing tool (one unique option is your Xbox).
Facetime uses only about 71.5% of data for video calls compared to Skype.
WhatsApp video calls use about 0.44 MB of data more for every four minutes a call lasts.
Microsoft Teams gained an additional 125 million users in 2022.
The growth rate of users from 2021 to 2022 was 86.2%.
Almost all (91%) of the Fortune 100 companies use Microsoft Teams.
Microsoft Teams hit 2.7 billion daily minutes at the end of March 2020.
Four out of five Microsoft Teams users in 2021 were at least 35 years old.
Almost three-fourths of Microsoft Teams users are male (72%).
Microsoft Teams is only available in 44 languages (42.7% of Skype’s 103).

Other Skype Statistics

Some Skype statistics don’t fall into any of the above categories, but they’re still important to consider when researching the company.

Consider the following numbers, from language translation to social media followers to emergency calls.

Skype will translate in real-time to more than 35 languages.
Some of the less common languages on that list include Bulgarian and Vietnamese.
Skype can host a video conference for as long as 24 hours at a time.
The Oxford English Dictionary made “Skype” a verb when it added it to the dictionary in 2014.
Skype allows you to call landline and mobile phone users in 60 different countries.
Standard Skype users can run group calls of up to 25 people.
The first video call happened in 1930, over 70 years before the founding of Skype.
About 55.5% of workers use video conferencing platforms every day.
Seventy percent of workers use messenger tools each day in the workplace.
Since the remote shift, over three-quarters (77%) of workers still prefer to communicate by email or phone.
Skype lets users label their meetings with a name, color, and emoji to keep from mixing them up, which is great considering many people have multiple meetings in a day.
You can call 911 using the Skype app, and it will share your location as long as you edit your settings accordingly.
As of October 2022, Skype has 4.9 million Twitter followers.
Skype has 721,000+ followers on Instagram.
The largest social media platform for Skype is Facebook, with over 26.7 million likes.
Skype’s name came from the phrase “sky peer-to-peer.”
The founders originally wanted to call the app “Skyper” but there was already a company by that name.
Skype launched a phone in 2007, but it wasn’t the most successful.

References