Having been bought by Ebay and then partially sold to a consortium, Skype yesterday announced that it will launch an IPO on Nasdaq some time later this year.

That doesn’t look good to me: big company buys fledgling co with razzmatazz, then fairly swiftly gets a consortium to cough up money….then even more swiftly asks the public to put hands in pockets. That spells hot potato more than hot number.

On the surface, things looke good for Skype. It has 560 million registered users and continues to grow – at around 30% annual moving: it added 86 million in the first six months of 2010. The Boston Globe last May said the number of registered users could nearly double to 1 billion by 2015. Ebay hopes that half of Skype’s registered users by that time will be business customers, who bring in 20 percent to 30 percent more revenue on average than consumers. The company began testing group video-conferencing two months ago, as part of its push for corporate business.

Further, Skype isn’t one of those dotcoms that’s all talk and no profit. It’s totted up $116 million of margin this year on $716M of revenue, and this figure could grow rapidly if the company succeeds in cracking the lucrative corporate market.

But there are worrying things in the usage data. While Skype aims to hit a billion users by 2015, thus far well over 90% of them are very infrequent or completely lapsed Skypers. The company says it has 40 million actives, but the tecchie buzz is that the figure is closer to 34 million.

Even that may be too high. A little known fact about Skype is that is asks you to register a new account every time you switch to new/other pc/coms hardware. That strikes me as an odd thing to do.

There’s also something more than concerning about the ownership consortium’s valuation. With an estimated 2011 revenue of $1 billion, the company looks to be worth more than $5 billion. All the new owners have done is clarify some copyright issues with Skype’s founders, and tweak its software. They paid just $2.75 billion at purchase in 2009. Feels like a quick Buck to me – and it would involve using the same multiples as those for valuing Google. That’s bonkers – especially as a recent tecchie thread evoked one regular response: “Google voice is a better alternative to Skype”.

Last but not least, as a marketing man at heart (and a Skype user) there is a real problem with the positioning and future potential of the service. In its early years, it was pretty steam-driven and unreliable. And for many uses, it still involves, basically, the process of one land line ringing another and hoping the person’s in. Mobile usage is obviously there now, but it’s not free.

My guess is that a huge proportion of core usership is older generation family users calling the new generation on the other side of the globe. Outside of this, my personal use of the system has almost entirely lapsed…and the stats support this as being normal.

It can transfer data free, and of course ‘minute-watching’ on expensive calls was always a bind. But that market is changing rapidly now – and not in ways that benefit Skype. Other systems have caught up, and tariffs are coming down.

Getting a straight answer to ‘What is it?’ from Ebay has become increasingly difficult. It’s for families, it’s for data, it’s for video-conferencing….it’s Superskype. I don’t think so.

But the IPO’s sponsors may well get away with it, largely due to the scarcity value of Silicon Valley launches these days – and also because the offering itself ($100M) is not exactly Major League. Some commentators are confidently predicting a scramble for shares, and thus a rapid rise in price.

My bet is that if things are still the right way up later this year (which I doubt) some smart money will hitch onto the rocket….and then quickly sell again. And if things are tits up, tiny or not the offering isn’t going to have much appeal.

Less superficially, The Slog thinks any serious investor will be buying a pup. I think Skype is a 21st century CB Radio: a tiny minority activity which will make us nostalgic in the future – in a giggly sort of way.