Skype's steady march to become a fee-based telecom service took another step forward today with the launch of Skype Voicemail. With each day, Skype is more like a traditional VOIP service provider rather than P2P software. With 42 million registered users - a number growing by 150,000 a day - and growing sources of revenue, Skype seems on its way to becoming a real business and/or a takeover candidate.
I'm not sure about the Skype-Yahoo rumors but it can only be a matter of time before Skype's growing role in the telecom market and its large user base brings someone out of the woodwork. So who would buy Skype and how much would it cost them? I would think the potential suitors include Yahoo, Google, AOL and even Microsoft. For anyone with an IM client, Skype seems like a logical choice to add integrated voice functionality. Obviously, Google doesn't have an IM service yet but a move into telephony seems like a natural route.
As for a selling price, you have to gues-stimate given Skype doesn't disclose revenue or ARPU. A starting point would be Skype's $18-million venture capital round earlier this year. This had to be based more on the value of the company's registered users which includes about one million subscribers who have paid for SkypeIn or SkypeOut at least once, than Skype's revenue, which was about $20-million last year. So what metric do you use: the number of registered users or revenue, or a combination of both? Vonage is worth about $2,000 a user but it has ARPU of $20 to $25 a month. Let's assume Skype has ARPU of $0.10 (42 million users x $1.20 a year = $50-million of revenue in 2005). If Vonage has an estimated valuation of $1 billion to $1.5-billion, my totally unscientific, back-of-the-napkin number-crunching suggests Skype is worth $250-million to $300-million. The next question is who's willing to make a move on Skype, and the patience of CEO Niklas Zennstrom and investors such as Draper Fisher Jurvetson.