eBay is selling Skype (News - Alert) for $1.9 billion to an investor group led by Silver Lake and includes Index Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. As part of the deal, eBay (News - Alert) keeps a 35 percent stake in Skype.

 

In 2008, Skype generated revenues of $551 million, a 44 percent increase compared to 2007. Registered Skype users reached 405 million by the end of 2008, a 47 percent increase from 2007.

 

Few observers seem to think any immediate repercussions exist for end users and partners. Mobile and fixed telecom providers might be happy about one aspect of the deal, though: the company that did not buy Skype.

 

The New York Times reports that Google (News - Alert), long a rumored suitor for Skype, indeed had entered discussions to buy the Internet phone service in July. But Google ended up walking away from the deal for several reasons, apparently.

 

Unresolved patent litigation was a concern. If Skype founders were to win that case, Google might be "vulnerable to immense damages" that made the deal too risky.

Google also was said to be worried that owning Skype could alienate its relationship with wireless carriers, who are increasingly rolling out phones based on Google's Android (News - Alert) operating system.

 

For those of you who like to calculate the value of such things, Skype's share of global international traffic now is somewhere north of eight percent, representing about 33 billion minutes of use, according to TeleGeography. Total international voice traffic was about 417 billion minutes.

 

If one divides Skype's revenue by its minutes of use, one gets an average of two cents a minute.

 

If one wants to derive the implied equity valuation of a single minute of global voice traffic, valued as Skype is, it is something like eight cents a minute.