Conspiracy theories, revisited

I've been seeing more broker/investment bank URLs in the site lately, one in particular with growing frequency. Said bank even apparently posted a link to my site on some sort of internal message board/wiki, judging from the referral data I could see in my Site Meter summary. So, I have managed to outsource myself, at last! The post was called "Google to buy Skype," and I think it was in response to this post. If there is any substance to this story from yesterday (and eBay investors certainly seemed to think there is), then I feel even more comfortable with this scenario.

How's this for vertical integration? You have arguably the world's most extensive contact database (which is growing evermore suited to the mobile environment), feeding into/fed by an advertising machine which others would kill for, add Skype as the connector/facilitator (and generator of incremental revenue through breakout services, voicemail, video, etc.), and own the billing engine for all of the transactions which this chain could capture/enable. You potentially extract value at every step - search, contact, completion. Whether you build it or buy it, I think the rationale is there to put all the pieces together, and speed to market is probably of the essence.