MySpace and Skype partnership: what's in it for Skype

Stan Beer
Wednesday, 17 October 2007 17:51

Opinion and Analysis

The world's number one social network MySpace has joined forces with the world's number one Internet telephony provider Skype to provide a seamless free instant messaging and voice call service for MySpace users. We know the benefits for MySpace - its members get an excellent IM chat and free voice calling service, But what's in it for Skype?

The answer is really quite simple - the US. Skype, with 220 million plus users globally, is easily the most widely used unified IM and Internet voice calling service in the world. However, for reasons yet to be determined, this excellent peer-to-peer Internet communications service remains largely untouched in the US.

When I visited New York recently, without my free Skype and cheap Skypeout paid telephony service I would have been severely disadvantaged. Wherever there was an Internet hot spot, including my hotel room, I was making telephone calls from my laptop all over the US and the rest of the world for just over 2 cents a minute to landlines and around 20-25 cents a minute to mobile phones. My telephone bill for making hundreds of minutes of business calls for my one week stay was under $7!

With the newer Skype enabled phones, these days you don't even need a computer.

Yet for some reason, most US online users remain oblivious to the benefits of Skype. They prefer to plod along with the inferior offerings from Microsoft, Yahoo, Google and others or continue to pay through the nose for their telephony services while on the road.

Thus, for Skype, the benefits of being integrated with MySpace are obvious. With more than 100 million users, mostly based in the US, MySpace is giving Skype the opportunity to build its brand in the US in a way it has never been able to do previously.

As John Delaney, principal analyst at European based telecoms analyst Ovum puts it: "The ability to link MySpace profiles and content with a Skype account, in particular, may prove to be an important means of boosting the number of US consumers who are aware of and use Skype."

And brand awareness is what it's all about with Skype. I was a user of the free PC to PC Skype service for well over a year before I ventured to try the paid Skypeout service. However, once I realized how convenient and cheap Skypeout was, I became a convert to the paid service.

No doubt Skype and its owner Ebay are hoping that millions of US MySpace undergo a similar revelation when they start using Skype.