Digital Home Thoughts: Skype to Get Ads

"Bad news for folks who aren’t a fan of adverts and use Skype. If the little ad on the bottom left corner wasn’t enough to irk you, Skype has announced that they will be adding another advert to their highly popular VoIP program. The ads will appear in the Skype “Home” screen and this week, the ads will be from Groupon, Visa and Universal Pictures."

It had to happen eventually. Skype, that wonderful, free Internet phone platform had to succumb to economics at some point. Yes, they have premium services, but not much money is made off of that and while the free services only have a marginal cost to the company, when you multiply that cost by over 600 million users, it still adds up. While I am no thrilled about ads, I think it is a fair trade off for what Skype offers. If it helps keep Skype running, I am all for it. Most computers these days are more than powerful enough to handle displaying an ad or two in addition to everything else it is doing, and I hardly see the Home page anyways.