In an attempt to help monetize their platform, the VoIP king is launching ads upon Skype and is even leveraging their relationship with Facebook in order to empower users to share the ads with friends.
While including ads may help Skype off set the cost of providing free video chat services for millions of users, the question is will their service pay off?
Skype “Home†provides a sponsored large masthead space at 650 x 170 pixels expandable to 650 x 340 pixels for advertisers to display ads that can include audio or video. Since the ads are on Skype, advertisers can add a Click & Call button in the ad as another call to action. In addition, it allows people to share the ad to their Facebook or Twitter accounts, and with one-click, ads can also be closed with the “Close Ad†button. (Business Wire)
Skype’s plan on placing ads upon the home screen instead of on top of conversations is great for Skype fans, but it may not benefit advertisers as users will probably spend most of their time in the “conversational area” of Skype (unlike the home page).
Unless Skype was able to present some kind of “Groupon like” deal of the day, I fail to see how these ads will receive an abundance of user attention outside of Skype fans closing the ad out of annoyance.
Although it’s great to see Skype putting users ahead of advertisers, hopefully the company an adopt a strategy that benefits users and advertisers in order to help pay for their free video chat sessions.
(Image Credit: Official Skype Blog)
Originally posted on March 7, 2011 @ 1:23 pm