Big companies have been on an internet spending spree this year and there is no end in sight.

To me the aquisition by News Corp of IGN for $650 million was expected — the purchase of Skype by eBay for $4.1 billion was not. Why would an online auction site want to own a VoIP company? Buying Paypal made sense because most of eBay’s users use Paypal for their purchases — but why Skype?

David Kirkpatrick over at Fortune has an idea why these big purchases are happening:

We are seeing the first signs of the emergence of a small group of e-commerce service companies of a new type—essentially they’re integrated online commerce conglomerates. They aim not only to replace shopping malls, but also TV networks, telecommunications, and the banking system, among other services. And they want to do so globally.

The companies he identifies are “Google, eBay, MSN, Amazon, Yahoo, and AOL” He thinks a few other companies may join this list such as News Corp, or Chinese companies Baidu or Alibaba (Yahoo actually purchased partial ownership in Alibaba this year for over $1 billion.)

As a website publisher its worth paying attention to what is happening here.

For example, Google owns Adsense. Yahoo has launched a program to compete with Adsense, Yahoo Publisher Network (still in beta) and MSN probably will too. This means more competition — Google is going to have to work harder and give publishers a bigger cut of the pie to keep them on board.

On the flip side, we have a company like eBay which dominates the online auction market. They have been increasing their fees rather than cutting them — because they have no competition.

I hope these companies are able to compete against each other for years to come — it means more money for us publishers.