Although Skype has been around for a few years, my first known encounter with the internet telephony provider took place last Fall when the CEO of an online gift store contacted me about writing press releases for his company. He asked me almost immediately whether I was using Skype and made sure that I knew he was.

I wasn’t impressed by the quality of his calls as most of the conversations we had were not very clear. At the time my phone service was with one of Ma Bell’s offspring, but I later switched to internet telephony as provided by our cable company. Skype, which offers a free service, doesn’t compare to the quality of the calls Time Warner Cable offers to me. Then again, I have never downloaded Skype for my personal use.

eBay acquired Skype for a hefty $2.6 billion in September 2005 from a pair of entrepreneurs, Niklas Zennstrom of Sweden and Janus Friis who hails from Denmark. Both men founded the peer-to-peer file sharing company KaZaA in 2000 which they sold a few years later in order to start Skype.

Footnote: Zennstrom and Friis are now on their third joint start up — the interactive software program Joost.

Now back to eBay. Two years after acquiring Skype, Zennstrom is gone and eBay has finally realized that the price that they paid for Skype was too high. Indeed, eBay says that they are writing down the value of Skype by $900 million to better reflect Skype’s actual worth. eBay is writing off an additional $530 million to pay off several Skype investors including Zennstrom who was Skype’s Chief Executive Officer under eBay.

The total of the “impairment charge” being taken by eBay is a whopping $1.43 billion.

What does this story have to do with Britney Spears? Not a whole lot other than this: the value of your commodity — whatever/whoever it is — could be grossly overpriced. When Skype/Spears’ performance drops, what are you left with? Answer: Big losses and a tarnished image.