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Hitwise Intelligence - Heather Hopkins - UK

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Skype, Bebo and Vonage - Why Skype Visits are Through the Roof

May 24, 2006

Amid a second coming of the dot com boom, Vonage's float received a luke-warm reception yesterday. According to a story in the Washington Post, shares fell 12.6% after floating at $17 a share. I have watched Vonage for some time and have not seen visits take off. The firm did a ton of expensive dispay and print advertising in the past few months but we never saw much of a pick- up in visits to Vonage's UK site on Hitwise.

The following chart shows the weekly share of UK visits to Skype and Vonage UK. I should note that we are tracking visits to the webistes for these services, not the downloaded application. This means we are largely seeing new users going to the site to get information and possibly to download the software.

Vonage v Skype.png

Earlier this month, Skype and Bebo announced a partnership to take VOIP social. The partnership allows users to host "Skypecasts" with up to 100 participants on the same call and we have already seen a massive impact on Skype's traffic. Last week, 58% of visits to Skype came from Bebo. The following chart shows the increase in upstream visits to Skype from Bebo over the past few weeks. Remember that the deal was announced 2nd May. The pick up since then has been pretty remarkable. The #2 downstream site from Bebo last week was Skype, which received 5% of Bebo's visits.

Upstream from Skype.png