No other way to describe it but as stunning as the rumours about eBay Inc. acquiring Skype turned out to be true. For a cool $2.6-billion in cash and additional payments based on future performance (which could apparently boost the deal to US$4.1-billion), eBay has dramatically and quickly become one of the leading and highest profile VOIP players. Can I stop here to express my surprise again? As I mentioned last week, the idea of eBay acquiring PayPal.com or Rent.com makes complete sense as do investments in eBay China or the purchase of a Chinese auction house. But Skype? It will be fascinating to hear today's Webcast at 8 a.m. to hear how eBay justifies Skype's acquisition from a strategic perspective. 

Here's my initial take on why eBay made the deal. Part of it has to be defensive. It has become increasingly obvious the Web will be dominated by a handful of large companies (eBay, Google, Amazon, AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo and News Corp. if it keeps making acquisitions). The key consideration is traffic but in a different way from the dot-com days when attracting traffic was more about attracting VC or pumping up a stock price. Today, the strong growth of the advertising and e-commerce markets means traffic is big business. Skype brings more than 52 million registered users to eBay and 2 million paying customers. With this database, eBay can cross-sell its other services and, at the same time, generate new revenue from voice services as Skype moves into the mainstream. Looking at a slide from the Webcast presentation, one thing that struck me is that eBay can easily integrate Skype into the eBay selling and buying experience so that when you're doing business you can easily make a phone call. At the same time, eBay can be integrated into Skype so its users can easily jump into an auction. eBay CEO Meg Whtiman said lead generation will be a new business line for eBay by making it easy (for a fee, of course) for sellers to have buyers contact them.
It's probably not a big issue right now but I wonder what Niklas Zennstrom and and Janus Friis do now after having Kazaa and Skype under their entrepreneurial belts? For those interested in Zennstrom's thoughts - nothing too surprising, mind - click here while Whitman's message is here.
For more details, check out Skype Journal, which reports Skype had $7-million in revenue last year and expects to have $60-million in 2005 and $200-million in 2006.
For more thoughts from the blogosphere, check out Christopher Carfi , Andy Abramson (who thought the deal made sense when it was first raised by the Wall Street Journal last week) and Rich Tehrani.