Posts by Doug Williams from April 22, 2008

Doug Williams | April 22, 2008, 10:33 AM
More Attempts at Monetizing Skype

Yesterday, eBay’s Skype announced a new monthly flat-rate pricing schedules for domestic, North America, and international calling using SkypeOut. These plans include calls to both landlines and cell phones within the US, Canada, China, Hong Kong and Singapore; “free” calls to the other 30 countries are limited to landlines. “Unlimited” calling is actually restricted to 10,000 minutes per month (roughly 5 ½ hours per day) per Skype’s fair usage policy, but that is actually quite generous. Many U.S. incumbent local exchange carriers have a presumed ceiling of 6,000 monthly minutes for their own residential flat-rate local services, above which the carrier would suspect business use of a residential service.

Will these calling plans encourage use of SkypeOut in the U.S.? eBay/Skype are notorious for limiting the release of useful subscriber metrics, so that question will likely go unanswered. My sense is it will have a limited impact here in the U.S., for three reasons:

(1) Those consumers who previously used SkypeOut for international calling did so to take advantage of Skype’s relatively lower rates, so while the number of minutes may increase, there is not a tremendous opportunity to increase subscribership above current levels;
(2) Skype still offers free PC-to-PC voice chat and video chat, and to my knowledge free is still a lot cheaper than $9.95 per month; and
(3) The added convenience of placing a call to an actual phone rather than a computer will likely be outweighed by the inability to take advantage of unlimited calling to cell phones in most countries.

Clients are invited to view this recent Jupiter report on PC-based communications for data and analysis regarding consumer IM, voice and video chat, Skype, USB headset and webcam adoption and use.