This week e-Bay had recognized that Skype did not deliver its promise and we understood that hundreds of millions of VoIP subscribers does not translate immediately to billions of dollars in revenues.
Even with billions of call minutes, the low margin on per minuteVoIP calls and the aggressive-to-insane competitors subsidizing free calls, made VoIP entrepreneurs and service providers realize that the per-minute/ flat-fee subscription models are not the right business model for them.
There are two main alternative business models to the old subscription model which are:
- Ad-sponsored VoIP
- Connection to expert
Ad sponsored VoIP startups are eavesdropping to the conversation and offers subscribers advertisements related to the conversation topics.
Some of those companies are: 
PuddingMedia – Israeli startup providing ad- sponsored free calls, the advertisements are based on automatic speech recognition to match advertisement to call topics.
AdCalls – Just as the name says, free calls in exchange for advertisement and the right to call your friends whenever they like.
Voodoovox – yet another ad-sponsored call company.
Advertisement in search engines are well accepted, advertisements in email services are less popular and advertisement during phone calls are not welcomed: with call costs ranging between a few cents per minute to free, Ad-calls companies will have a hard time persuading clients to use their services.
Another popular business model is the connection-to-expert service. In this business model the service provider connects a client interested in consulting services with an expert that could assist him. The revenues from this model are taken as percentage of the expert consulting fees and not as “VoIP minutes”.
Some of the companies which provide such services are:
Liveperson / Kasamba – Liveperson is the leading chat and VoIP application for web sites which recently bought Kasamba, the expert advice company, the cooperation and synergy between the companies is interesting.
LiveMDexpert is another company providing medical consulting services including VoIP video and medical data via flash without the need to download anything
Bitwine uses Skype in order to connect advice seekers with experts
The expert connection seems like a profitable business model although its market might be small at the moment, we will see if expert connection companies could grow it to include other forms of interaction besides expert consulting, maybe dating?
3 comments:
The paradox skype has is that the better the application is (and it is good) and the more pervasive it is, the less paid calls they get (i.e. Skype out) people simply prefer to stay on the VoIP domain using PC to PC which in terms of sound quality is much better (in most cases) than a regular PSTN phone call.
Plus, Skype's VoIP gateways are not at the same quality level we learned to expect from Skype, in terms of QOS, to make them really attractive as a paid alternative to the PSTN.
BitWine http://www.BitWine.com was created to solve the paradox by using the pervasiveness of the Skype application to generate revenue (to Skype as well) from paid sessions utilizing the free VoIP calls.
It is now only a matter of attention by Skype and E-bay to take advantage of the BitWine platform (so far BitWine is superior in many aspects to the Skype prime and even uses PayPal), and help convert BitWine to the next e-Bay / Skype revenue generator.
Please be advised that the AdCalls Ad supported FREE world-wide VOIP service offers PC2Phone, PC2PC, and Phone2Phone service in exchange for the users viewing Ads that rotate on their FREE AdCalls Dialer.
At no time are the phone numbers called shared with any advertisers. In exchange for giving FREE world-wide calling, advertisers collect the Name and Email Address of the users to send Coupons and Special offers.
And even this information is not sold or shared with other Advertisers.
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