As Doug McIntyre mentioned earlier today, eBay (NASDAQ:EBAY) will soon start charging users of its Skype VoIP (Voice over IP) service $30 per year to use the service. I have expected this for quite some time, as eBay ponied up over $2 billion for the company. At some point it needs to accelerate the process of receiving a return on that investment beyond the current subscribers who pay for "SkypeIn" and "SkypeOut" Internet phone calls (an incoming telephone number and an outgoing any-number call capability, respectively).

What I am most interested here is how Skype customers will react to this situation. While everyone (I imagine) loves a free lunch, eBay shareholders are probably more interested in seeing the company's cash hoard grow even larger than it is (the company has over $3 billion in cash) and for some good to come from the Skype acquisition.

While eBay's acquisition of PayPal was a great decision and a perfect move for the time, many of us questioned why eBay would purchase a VoIP company like Skype. Are legions of its customers really using Skype to perform chats during auctions? That's hard to believe -- but maybe it's true. Yet, eBay has provided no proof.

There's nothing like a ringtone to set a girl apart from the other hangers-out at the coffee shop. Ringtone sales have been huge, says the Motley Fool's Rick Aristotle Munarriz, for companies like Infospace. But when Skype started selling ringtones, it was to a big ol' yawn from users - who really needs to set his computer ringtone apart from the other computers in his home office?

Munarriz sees a lot of potential, however, in the music download market. His belief is that Skype's 100 million-plus registered users might finally be monetized through music (and, naturally, video downloads and concert tickets), at last justifying eBay's purchase.

I have a hard time seeing this as such a huge advantage, personally - I'm a faithful Skype user, but I've never spent a penny with them. And music won't be the place where I start.

I own a few shares of eBay and zero Skype ringtones.