May 12, 2010 by James Oliver
Popular internet telephone service Skype has seen its popularity grow massively in recent years and this can be attributed mainly to the fact that whist it is indeed a high quality service it is also the favourite word of many internet users… free.
In order to keep the service’s key feature in tact Josh Silverman, Chief Executive at Skype has revealed that they are “seriously considering” launching third party advertising on the service.
“It’s challenging to get right as the way people use is Skype is very personal but we think our users expect us to do it so we can continue to support free. But it will be done in a tasteful way,” he explained.
At the moment there are no third party adverts on the Skype service at all so the addition of these adverts could cause some annoyance.
Skype seem to be doing all they can to ramp up their revenue steams at the moment as they have recently upgraded their premium offerings.
Third party adverts would not be ideal for users but would seem worth the slight hassle if they enabled the service to be kept free.
Last week Skype announced a while new range of monthly subscriptions offering their cheapest call rates yet across 170 countries.
Skype has grown so much that they look to be attempting to rival the major telecommunications companies to make audio calls to mobiles and landlines around the world on a ‘pay as you go’ basis.
Skype will also be launching a beta version of a ‘five way video’ group calling feature this week.
This new service will be free for the first 3 months while the company monitors its progress and gathers feedback, it will then become a pay monthly service as Skype look to cash in on their service.
Related posts:
