Skype Service Hits Benchmark Two Billion Minutes a Day

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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Internet telephone giant and pioneer Skype announced that members spend two billion minutes a day using its video chat service. The number proves just how badly Skype has hurt traditional phone companies, which both charge for calls and rarely have video features. It is not clear how badly this hurts the cellular subscription industry, but the trend must hurt landline communications as people use home PCs instead of home phones to communicate.

According to Mashable:

Skype announced Wednesday users are spending more than two billion minutes a day connecting with one another via the video-chat platform — enough time to watch 16 million movies or travel to the moon and back 225,000 times.

Not only is this is a big milestone for Skype in particular, it also highlights just how much people have embraced communicating via a voice over IP (VoIP) service.

“Skype has been growing in its number of minutes at double digit rate for a steady time,” Elisa Steele, corporate VP of marketing at Skype, said. “The number of mobile users continues to grow at a very strong rate too, not just from the desktop but other devices, as well.”

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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