eBay buys Skype

eBay buys Skype

The VoiP Market is going through a major shake up and like the dot com bubble, its all hype surrounding the VoiP business as of now. The rational behind eBay buying Skype is at best puzzling. The business model of Skype is totally different from that of eBay. In case eBay wanted to provide VoIP features to its online auction offering, it could have done that in various different ways, rather than paying a fat sum for buying Skype. Soon other players in the market would be providing with offerings similar to Skypepresence. Skype would provide eBay to go really international, with VoIP international calls, but then the price paid by eBay for just allowing international phone calls is really high.

One of the areas for concern for eBay is why would a seller pay additional fees for recieving calls over VOIP ? They can aswell share their phone numbers after establishing contact over email. Don't see a big value add on this front for eBay. The only company that stand to make money over VOIP are companies like google, msn or yahoo that can provide context sensitive search and then VoIP Calls based on search results.


One of reasons for success of Skype was that it was able to get customers to pay for using its service, for making international phone calls. But the revenue generated from this was not something that would have brought eBay knocking.

Even if eBay figures out how to strongly integrate SKYPE , what prevents from users from publishing their webpresence using other services like "Google Talk", Yahoo or MSN ??

eBay has to figure out a way to prevent users from using “Google Talk” or “Yahoo” in the future, when they come up with Click To Call feature to integrate with HTML and email.