Skype Launches Advertising Program

Today, Skype announce the launch of an advertising program - it's first ever - which will place ads on the Home tab of Skype for Windows. Groupon, Nokia, Universal and Visa and some of the initial advertisers.

The Home page ad unit will measure 650 X 170 and will expand to 650 X 340. It will also include the ability to embed audio and video. Each ad will contain a Click to Call button and sharing functionality with Facebook and Twitter.

On the decision to add advertising to the service, Skype CMO Doug Bewsher said, "The user experience on Skype is always job number one. So, we've spent a lot of time working through the best way to show advertising in the Skype environment. We believe our daily sponsorship ad from one brand per day is valuable for premier advertisers, but doesn't detract from the experience for our users. We are just taking our first steps in this space and we expect to test and learn a lot as we move forward."

Bewsher intends for the advertising to be as inobtrusive as possible and allow the company to improve the service with the influx of revenue gleaned through this advertising program.

Selling ad space for Skypw will be achieved through a partnership with Meebo in the U.S., Ad2One in the U.K and Stroer Interactive in Germany. In the fourth quarter of 2010, Skype saw 145 million average monthly connected users and 29 million concurrent users.