Ceci N’est Pas Une Skype

So I wanted to be the first to break the momentous news that eBay has officially acquired Skype for $2.6 billion. What’s that you say? Someone else has already reported that? Everyone has?

Okay, so maybe it ain’t breaking news but I have a few things to say about this. The biggest question for me is why eBay, a company that has no obvious synergies with Skype, would be the one to take the plunge. This is particularly puzzling since the price can hardly be justified on financial grounds alone. According to the New York Times, Skype’s 2006 revenues are projected to be $200 million. Not bad, by any measure, but a thirteen-fold multiplier on forward revenues, not this year but a year hence, is pretty rich.

Are they paying for Skype’s user base? Skype has 53 million users, so that’s about $50 a pop. Not entirely out of the realm of imagination, I suppose, but consider that Microsoft paid about $20/user for Hotmail at the high of the dot.com boom. Besides which, how are they planning to turn Skype users into eBay users? Doesn’t strike me as particularly obvious.

Considering the fact that the scads of large companies that do have obvious synergies with Skype weren’t willing to pony up the cash to, ehm, outbid eBay, one might be tempted to conclude that they’ve become bored of the staid world of online auctions and paid through the nose for a bit of sexy Web 2.0 goodness. I have a better theory, presciently outlined here on Peer Pressure last week. I theorized that Skype might be in a strong position to create the universal identity infrastructure for the web. To support my theory, I drew an analogy with none other than eBay’s number one son, PayPal. And mind you, this was before I heard the eBay acquisition rumors.

Does eBay want to leverage its humungous user base, with strong reputation management features and (wait for it) built-in payment infrastructure, to create a more generalized identity mechanism? Uh oh, that almost makes sense.

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