Google’s Skype Interest Lies In Advertising
Source: smithonvoip.com
Is Google’s Rumored Interest in Skype All About Ad Dollars?
There is a lot of chatter around the industry about the Google potentially acquiring Skype, but what no one has mentioned is that this deal is really all about the ad dollars Skype could bring into Google. Many point to Google’s telco ambitions as a driver for the acquisition of Skype, but to date Google nothing that Google has done outside of search and advertising has been a hit, or even moderately successful. What Google is great at is selling ads and they should stick to it.
By acquiring Skype, Google would gain the ability to display ads on the Skype client (which gets them “on the desktop”), play audio ads before calls, and not to mention get them onto the cellular handset through Skype Mobile. Google could also make non-Skype-to-Skype calls absolutely FREE, favoring an ad-support model rather than the current pay-per-minute model. Google likes to offer free services supported by ads (after all that is what their search engine is) and telephony has long wanted a player to come and make it completely free, supported of course, by ads.
But what if you do not buy the telco angle or the advertising angle? Well, try this one on for size. How about Google buying Skype for their user data? It widely known that Google wants to know every single detail about you and your life in order to catalog it all in an index and deliver more targeted ads to you. They recently launched Open Social to “get to know you better” and have even provided funding to a company that wants to be the world’s trusted source of personal genetic information.
Buying Skype for the chance to learn more about 80 million people? That’s not so far fetched.
Call me a conspiracy theorist on this one, but I don’t buy the Google-Skype telco angle.
