Globally and within India as well, VoIP and international bandwidth players are faced with the challenge of gradually dropping minutes of usage. But not so for eBay’s Skype which along with Paypal turned out to be savior for eBay in the recently announced Q3 financial performance.

The last quarter saw 40 million new subscribers added to its fold taking the total subscriber base to 521 million at a yoy growth rate of 41 %. Revenues grew 29% to $ 185 million. While the free minutes comprising of Skype-to-Skype calls touched 27.7 billion minutes, SkypeOut for which Skype charges its users, grew by 44% to 3.1 billion minutes.

Contribution from international traffic accounted for as much as 81 %.

Parent company eBay however witnessed its net drop by 29% to $ 350 million. Revenues were up 6 % to $ 2.2 billion.