Bill Cobb, President, eBay North America, presented to investors (Windows Media Player video) at the JP Morgan Global Internet Conference, March 14, 2006. Bullets about Skype from the presentation (pdf file):

• Communications
• 75M accounts in 2005
•  ~$200M+ revenue in 2006
•  Adding 190K+ users / day
•  5.2M concurrent users
• Presence in 255 countries
• Skype is a verb
• Thriving ecosystem, ~1,500 developers
• Great synergies with eBay and PayPal

Let’s look at these one by one.

75M accounts in 2005
This is a cumulative number. It includes accounts abandoned by users and duplicate accounts per user (e.g. test account, home account, work account). It does not tell you:

1. How many were used in the last 30 days?
2. How many are running a version of the software updated in the last year?
3. How many have used a fee service?

~$200M+ revenue in 2006
How much of this is expected to come from user fees, cash float (user fees are prepaid), portal partners, and licensees? Doubling the active user base from 2005 should double the fees and cash float from $60 million to $120. Where will the other $80 million come from? At 5% of wholesale, this require the sale of 60 million $50 Skype co-branded headsets.

Adding 190K+ users / day
At this rate, Skype will pick up another 69 million users. We’re not clear if these are downloads, accounts, or people. Definitions aside, this is no longer exponential growth. They were adding 150k users per day in April 2005. This suggests that the cost of customer acquisition is about to go up. Skype must discover and overcome barriers to further virality.

Presence in 255 countries
The UN has 191 member countries, so I suppose this includes smaller or undefined territories and protectorates not commonly thought of as nations. Skype's global nature is both a strength and a challenge. Diversification can encourage innovation among users and developers, but exploiting the business opportunities and supporting these users is resource intensive. 

Skype is a verb
True. Skype’s advantage this year is that Skype-powered conversations are qualitatively different from mobile or landline phone calls, not just cheaper. Around Skype Journal “Skype me” connotes presence (so you’re better able to negotiate when and how to talk), flexibility (able to fit the mode (text, voice, video, conferencing) to the task), reliability (“it just works”), and quality (“it sounds better than a regular phone”).

Thriving ecosystem, ~1,500 developers
Not sure if these are developer companies or people. Just for contrast, tiny little Asterisk has 4500 developers talking on its discussion mailing list. The Bureau of Labor Statistics showed 2.8 million programmers, analysts, etc. working in the US in 2004. eBay ended 2005 with 25,000 outside developers, according to Cobb. So if all of Skype’s developers were in the US, Skype is claiming to have attracted 1 in 1889 of them to the Skype platform, or 0.05% US mind share.
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/ocwage.t01.htm

Great synergies with eBay and PayPal.
Enormous promise, pilots started, but results are pending.

Almost like being there.

Tags: skype, skypejournal, ebay, ecosystem, paypal, statistics, investors, jpmorgan, finance