Skype to test advertising
From innovation to desperation?
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If you’re one of the millions of people who have learned to love unreliable service and uncertain call quality, Skype has good news: its intention to introduce advertisements to inflate its value ahead of the IPO won't change a thing.
Announcing its advertising plans, the "hugely popular free Internet communications service" [sic] said advertisements will only be inflicted on users in the UK, US and Germany at this stage.
Skype's blog post faithfully promises users that "the ads won’t interrupt your Skype experience" (which can be more reliably left to its servers anyhow). Banner ads will instead be displayed in the home tab of future Windows clients.
Skype has long suffered from the stubbornly abysmal spend of its customers: eight years after the company was founded, its 560 million registered users still generate just US$406m – or around 72 US cents per user, per half* year.
Users will be able to opt out of ads using the privacy settings in their Skype client. ®
*Correction: as a reader correctly pointed out, Skype's US$406 million was a half-year number. Mea maxima culpa. Compared to even a minor (on a world scale) carrier such as Telstra, US$1.40 per customer per year is a minuscule ARPU. ®
COMMENTS
What's 6 months between enemies ?
If you are going to be condescending and mocking and provide links in your articles, it would do you well to READ (and properly comprehend) those articles yourselves first.
"Skype generated $406 million in revenue in the first half of 2010"
See that? "FIRST HALF" ... so not $406m per year but $812m. That may not be much in terms of $/user/year but it's still not to be sniffed at.
But since you're scoffing, perhaps you'd like to share the Revenue per user per year that The Register enjoys ? It must be significantly more than Skype achieve for you to be so comfortably mocking. One would hope.
Linux and Skype
@Combat Wombat
What are you on about? There has been a Linux Skype client for years.
Enjoy sucking on those adverts (that I won't be seeing on my open source IM/VOIP client).
RE: I won't see ads
You're a Skype user, you are a tiny percentage of the market which no one cares about.
Things which provide voice chat abilities:
- Messenger clients
- Remote desktop applications/ Virtual Conference applications
- Other VOIP options.
Examples of the above: MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, TeamSpeak, Ventrilo, GotoMeeting.
Skype has never been the only option.
"Free" phonecalls and yet you pay for the service?
And the Internet Connection?
And the Electricity the computer, router, modem etc need to run?
Cheap? Maybe - depending on aformentioned costs being included in the tally during your comparison.
Free? Is not, never was, never will be.
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