Skype advertising update
blogs.skype.com
Apologies for the "editorialized" title. It was a sort of (admittedly biased) off-the-cuff comment.
blogs.skype.com
How can Skype pretend something is desirable if it goes away automatically when you pay? That's nearly the definition of undesirable.
- Maybe a couple of people will think, "Meh, another ad-based monetization business plan. I'll live with it."
- Many people will see this and think, "Ads? Forget this, I'm using gchat/facebook/facetime/other free video service without ads."
This, to me, is what is wrong with all basing your revenue on advertising. Skype's mention that "this will make Skype more engaging and useful" is laughable. Basing a business plan on advertising is a decision to provide a cheaper/free service at the cost of deliberately worsening the UI and, ultimately, the user's experience with your product. That's a serious trade-off indeed.
As for the free users, well, fuck them. Nobody owes them free services or software. The implicit contract with someone providing you something for free is that they're monetizing you and your interaction with their service some other way. (My new favorite quotes: [1])
[1] http://blog.earlh.com/index.php/2012/06/two-quotes-about-the...
edit: @eykanal: I meant fuck the free users whining about advertising.
As to your "fuck 'em", if that's your attitude, why bother servicing them at all? Providing ads is simply a way of enabling free users. Stop the ads and the free users, you'll be better off. There's been a lot of links about that, here's one: [1].
And I love those quotes.
Skype is mature from a user base perspective. Holding off on monetizing free users until network effects start to bring real pull is a great game plan.
Actually, ads on Skype probably would have been fine, if they'd done it many years ago. When Skype was new, it was an incredible deal. Voice chat! To anywhere in the world! For free! (Or a small price if you want to use the phone network at either end.) That was such an incredible deal that nobody would have minded if ads were included as part of it -- what else you gonna do? Pay long-distance rates to the telephone company?
Nowadays we're all spoiled and accustomed to the fact that we can video-chat with anyone at any time for no money and no ads, so this sounds just plain annoying.
Sounds like an April 1st joke or an article from the Onion, except it is real.
So what if you use Skype credit and load it with $0.01. Is that enough? What if you never upgrade to the latest Skype client, is this technology already built it anyway.
Most of all time to look at WebRTC and open source alternatives. Anyone know of anything that is functional?
something like this? http://www.theonion.com/video/new-google-phone-service-whisp...
Skype has been a critical part of my personal life, never mind my business life, for free, for several years.
They can do whatever they want with the otherwise blank screen I have during the audio call for all I care.
What part of this would make anyone actually stop using Skype?
Imagine a grieving mother talking about the recent loss of her son, and the ads being offered up are for childrens' clothes or child friendly activities.
Over all though, it's just one more spot they're putting ads on. By now, this is nothing new.
That said, I definitely won't be happy to see Ads popping up in Skype, but I use it so infrequently, it barely impacts me.
Additionally, I'd avoid throwing around grandiose statements about how benevolent you'd be if you had the resources for it. We'd all be out saving the world if time/resources/etc weren't an issue.
Eh, I don't see it as that big of a deal. They're providing a free service, it looks like it's only there when you're not video chatting, it uses real estate that isn't already used, and (at least the first version) only allows silent, non-expanding ads.
Might be time to move.
A lot of people think running things is free. We all need to realize that maintaining the code base, running the servers etc all cost money. Companies are in the business of making money and if they can make money while providing a free service why not?
Those of us who are not happy with it, should just pay for it to offset the costs :)
> reach our hundreds of millions of connected users in a place where they can have meaningful conversations about brands in a highly engaging environment.
They should have turned the pro version into some cross between eLance and Campfire. Where you can find professionals to incorporate into the stream of a conversation or workflow.
But alas, they did some mediocre and they'll get a mediocre return.
Once you have that stuff done building voice chat on top is trivial.
I would welcome a change of this policy.
I'm surprised there's no popular, open source VoIP/Chat protocol that allows any compatible client to connect to either a server or other users through a P2P connection.
Hahaha that's a new one
Which service currently offers the best experience?
Still, this sounds awful.
Too bad, really. It's about time the industry came up with a standard voip / video protocol. Facetime would be as good a standard as any to rally around if it was opened up.