eBay is moving to increase its advertising revenue. It is an area that has become increasingly profitable for the company, and increasing profitability has probably never been more important for eBay.
eBay sellers are increasingly flocking to other sites like Amazon, Bonanzle, and many others to do their business, and that means less money for eBay. Yet eBay still has a large user base that is no doubt attractive to advertisers, and it stands to reason that there is plenty of money for the company to make in that area. In a Steiner at AuctionBytes writes:
Advertising is a touchy subject with sellers who pay listing and commission fees and find themselves competing with ads, something Yahoo recognized in 2005. When it decided to monetize its Yahoo Auctions site through advertising, it first eliminated all seller fees. AuctionBytes has documented the appearance of ads on eBay search results pages that promote products that directly compete with sellers’ listings.
eBay has since expanded the placement of ads. It has promoted its Kijiji classifieds website on eBay.com, sometimes displaying an invitation and link at the top of search results, and last year for the first time it placed advertising directly on product listing pages in Australia, Austria, Switzerland, France, Italy, and the UK. In August, Australian sellers were outraged when ads for the FoxTel digital television subscription service began appearing on their View Item pages directly below the “Place Bid” button.
eBay offers display advertising, strategic partnerships, and international exposure along with some stats that are hard for advertisers to ignore. On a global scale, eBay says it has 7.1 million listings added per day, and it had 667 million new listings in the second quarter of 2008.
Steiner notes that this week, eBay named Phillip Rinn as its first director of advertising partnerships for the combined territories of UK, Ireland and pan-EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa).
