SlideShare Launches Paid Accounts

SlideShare has added fee-based premium accounts to its until now exclusively free site for posting, viewing, rating and commenting on business presentations, documents and videos.

On Monday, SlideShare plans to announce its paid Pro accounts, labeled Silver for individuals (US$19 per month), Gold for small businesses ($49 per month) and Platinum for enterprises ($249 per month).

The Pro features include access to content usage analytics, the ability to capture sales leads, the elimination of ads and the branding and management of a custom channel.

SlideShare, which will continue to offer free accounts, receives about 30 million visitors to its site every month. These users, mostly business decision makers, view about 70 million pages every month.

Because its users are mostly professionals and its content business-related, it makes sense for SlideShare to add premium accounts with features like analytics and sales lead capturing, the company said.

Earlier this year, SlideShare launched its Channels service, which lets companies sponsor and create microsites to promote their products and services. Channels can focus on a topic, which companies can choose to sponsor, or they can be devoted to a specific brand.

SlideShare also offers other marketing services like AdShare, which matches ads to relevant content, and LeadShare, which prompts site visitors to provide contact information to receive more information about certain vendors or products.