eBay's purchase of Skype has been widely reported since its announcement early this morning. The $2.6b purchase price isn't far short of the $3b bid Rupert Murdoch was rumored to be mulling just a few weeks ago, and the deal reportedly rockets up to $4.1b if certain financial targets are met.
It seems clear to me that the strategy here is a socially-oriented one -- has eBay just purchased Skype's 54 million users along with its proprietary technology? That translates to about $48.15 per Skype user, if so. And this seems different from past eBay acquisitions such as Half.com and Paypal. Half.com helps ebay by expanding the extent to which ebay controls its own ecosystem endogenously, seeing as how half.com users were already naturally engaging in the type of behavior ebay wanted to promote. Doubly so for paypal, seeing as how ebay users were already using it for ebay in particular.
Skype doesn’t seem to do that nearly as naturally -- Skype may facilitate communications amongst ebay users, although I’m not so sure that it’s a better alternative to e-mail for this purpose. But I’d wager the vast majority of Skype users use Skype for non-bidding purposes. So Skype's real value here will be as the social 'glue' that keeps eBay users engaged by eBay services.
eBay's presentation about the Skype acquisition to its investors is well worth a read -- you can access it here. Indeed, eBay paints a "power of 3" picture of its killer app triumverate -- eBay, Paypal and, now, everybody's favorite VoIP software.
Now, eBay claims to have "more than 100 million people around the world" that buy and sell on its site. So that's an impressive, certainly vibrant social community. But historically, also highly task-specific. is eBay really the best player to leverage Skype's incredible, socially-driven organic growth? I still think NewsCorp might have made a far more natural home.
don't get this acq. It might have made sense for AOL, Yahoo, Google, or MS, but eBay? Skype's forte is a bit more than just 1-1 chat. It's a gnutella-like client capable of multi-user voice conferencing, and perhaps soon video too. And it works very well. Moreover it's on ALL platforms. Frankly, Skype is the strongest threat to the telephony as we use it today, since it offers possibility to bridge over to the traditional phone networks rather seamlessly (use it for that purpose all the time).
Sooo.... My guess is that eBay ran out of the room to grow, and is looking for another vehicle, and thought this would be a good one. eBay has big pockets, and may grow Skype into who-knows-what. But then again, so far their acquisitions were very pragmatic and functional...
Posted by: Mile Milisavljevic | September 13, 2005 at 11:13 AM
"If you take the elements of eBay, including the micro-payments capability of Paypal and, now, the IP-based communications capabilities of Skype, we may be seeing the formation of the next Reuters."
http://pulverblog.pulver.com/archives/002880.html
http://divedi.blogspot.com/2005/09/ebay-buys-skype.html
Posted by: Dimitar Vesselinov | September 15, 2005 at 02:35 PM