About two days ago the Telegraph made an interesting interview with Josh Silverman, the CEO of Skype in which he revealed that the company is “seriously considering” serving ads on the service.
In this interview Josh Silverman also imagines the service as being “the fabric of real-time communication on the web” in ten years. As this is basically the case for language teaching on the web right now I think it is worth to have some thoughts on the possible impacts of this decision.
First of all we need to take into consideration that Skype is now on its own again after it has been sold by eBay after a long legal fight with the founders of the service. eBay still holds 30 percent, the two founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis hold 14 percent but the biggest part, 56 percent, now belongs to the investor group Silverlake.
And as the name investor implements, for those guys the 56 percent are an investment which basically means they want to get more money out one day than they paid for the share. And this leads to the “problem” that Skype needs to become profitable. Right now the main income for Skype are international calls and the company just lowered the rates by about 60 percent which basically makes the service the cheapest one on the market. Nevertheless this might not be enough and of course a big part of the users of Skype are using the service for free Skype to Skype calls, like most of us language teachers. So, how to monetize on this big part of users who basically just cause costs for Skype but don’t pay for the service? Right, the magic potion that holds the internet together these days: ads.
Now don’t get me wrong. I think ads are a valid way of generating some revenue. You just have to look at this blog and if you are not using an ad blocker you will see that I am displaying ads, too. It’s a nice way to pay for the webhosting and a cup of coffee once in a while. But I don’t think it’s a business model if you are not Google.
So, what might those ads look like? I think to get an idea you could check out ooVoo.com a similar service I used for my first EDUKWEST interviews. The service is displaying ads around the video call but you can pay a fee per month to get the service ad free.
Hence the question is: how are ads affecting the teaching / learning process? Sean Banville just wrote a blog post about ad blockers and how they are putting free educational websites in danger as some educators build their product around them. On the other hand you have to take into consideration that in some countries some kind of ads might be seen as offensive for example the IMVU ads were half naked avatars are kissing each other. If your student from a muslim country sees this I think you can prepare for trouble. The question is: will you have control over the ads Skype is going to display or are your students going to see ads they don’t want to see. Will this affect your teaching business without you having a chance to regulate?
Babbel also made the valid point that blinking, flashy ads are simply distracting during the learning process. Imagine a blinking banner beneath your video or screensharing. Not very attractive, I think.
Hence what are the possibilities? Using an alternative and joining the caravane of educators that are leaving a service when it turns towards the rules of the market (Ning) or paying for the service to get an ad free version? The good news is that there will finally be a five way video calling feature but this will also turn into a paid feature after the beta.
Read the Telegraph interview with Josh Silverman | Read Sean Banville’s blog post about ad blockers
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