Skype market research: Exactly how much may we torture you for a free call to a business?
Sue Bailey at TameBay saw a Skype survey that asked about ad sponsored SkypeOut calling.
"Skype is thinking of playing a sponsored voice message just before making your call. Could you indicate for each sponsored message duration to what extent this would bother you?"
Durations: <5 seconds, 5-7, 8-10, 11-15, 16-20, 20-25, 25-30.
Degrees of pain:
"I would find this so annoying I would not use this service"
"I would find this annoying, but would use this service anyway"
"I would not find this annoying"
"It would be nice to hear the voice message"
The gap between how you think you'll feel (what you disclose in a survey) and your actual experience and behavior can be huge. (Let me know if you sign up for a pilot; the results should reveal more about the viability of voice/video ad injection by market and demographic.)
Ad supported calls to businesses might appeal to some Skypers, just to overcome the cost of calling.
However "toll free" services, where the recipient pays for incoming calls, may be more attractive and less intrusive.
P.S. Personally, I'd add to the survey:
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"It would offend me so much that I would tell all my friends to switch to another service"
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"This is so painful that I would join a boycott of advertisers"
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"I would call people just to hear the ads"
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"I want to play ads in the middle of calls so we can all enjoy the ad together"
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"I'd rather be offered a gallery of text, audio and video ads/coupons for this company or this category to view at my leisure"
tags: skype, marketing, market research, surveys, advertising, business models, ads, costs, free
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Comments
there are really so many factors. for example i would be incredibly upset if skype started to instert ads into calls on my current calling plan. on the other hand if i was the only one who heard the ads(not the person on the other end of the line) and got a tottally free of cvharge service in return i may be interested. i would in absolutly no condition expose my friends to ads during phone calls only myself. actually what i would really like is ther option to listen to ads in order to bring down the cost of calls to high termination destination(for example be able to call european cell phones for half price) this would be much better than free calls to already very inexpensive destinations(such as landline in europe/north america)
the bottom line is that i would need to see some real savings and be assured i am the pnly one exposed to the ads.
Posted by: tom | July 20, 2008 09:05 PM
The text/video/graphic ads suggestion is a good one, and in fact a later question in the same survey did ask about this. Personally I would hate that much less, though the bandwidth implications of video would worry me rather.
Posted by: Sue @ TameBay | July 21, 2008 02:42 AM