Skype's 1,800-strong club

Taking an increasingly pragmatic approach to its business, Internet phone provider Skype is now using affiliates to sell its voice mail service and other premium products.

Already, some 1,800 organizations have customer service.

"We hope we'll generate more revenue," Zennstrom said on Monday. "It's difficult to quantify just how much. But I'm confident it gives us growth."

Skype generates its revenue by selling premium services, which now include voice mail for $19 a year; SkypeOut, which lets subscribers make calls from the Internet to the traditional phone network for a few pennies a minute; and SkypeIn, which includes free voice mail and lets Skypers get incoming calls from the hundreds of millions of people who still use traditional phone services.

Skype gives away its chief productm, which is peer-to-peer software that allows users to make free phone calls between Internet-connected PCs, handhelds and cell phones. Since its release 20 months ago, the software has become one of the fastest-growing services in Internet history, and many believe it already has begun turning the traditional phone industry on its head.

So far, about 1.4 million people have signed up for SkypeOut. The company has not released the number of its SkypeIn and voice mail subscribers.