Those “Highlander” movies (and the television series) are fairly fuzzy memories for me, but I’m quite sure that they involved a bunch of guys running around, chopping each other’s heads off, and absorbing each other’s power. Well, Yahoo Auctions pretty much decapitated itself, but that act effectively leaves eBay as “the only one.”
Our own David Utter reached this conclusion when he wrote about Yahoo Auctions on Tuesday – note the graph at the bottom of his article. A few hours later, Hitwise’s LeeAnn Prescott released her own data for a different period of time. Taken together, these two reports indicate, without any room for doubt, that “Ebay [is] at 94% Share of Category.”
“EBay is the largest e-commerce site in the downstream for Yahoo! Search, at 1.34% of Yahoo! Search’s total downstream for the week ending May 5, 2007,” wrote Prescott. “In comparison, Yahoo! Auctions accounted for only 0.01% of the traffic leaving Yahoo! Search in that period.” So Yahoo’s offering was admittedly a very minor competitor, but it was a competitor nonetheless.
Then there’s the rumored eBay-StumbleUpon deal. As Kara Swisher suggested, “the online marketplace powerhouse shows a little more leg in its deal-in-the-making to pay way too much for a trendy Internet Web page discovery and recommendation service.” If eBay does, in fact, fork over $75 million for StumbleUpon, that display will be still more impressive.
But for now, eBay execs may remain content to have vanquished Yahoo. It is indeed an accomplishment, and, considering how far behind eBay’s closest competitors are, the auction site appears to have achieved a more permanent immortality than the “Highlander” franchise ever did.
