There’s no word from eBay’s side of things, but the cofounder and CEO of MySpace says his site could – at some point – be interested in partnering with the auction giant. Such a deal would be huge for both companies, and might also be damaging to Google.
Yet the deal is not at all a sure thing, even if one upgrade to MySpace is. “We will at some point offer user generated e-commerce transactions,” promised head honcho Chris DeWolfe. “So if you’re on your site and you have a line of T-shirts you have designed and you want to sell them to your friends, we want to be able to provide you with the tools you need to do that.”
As reported by the Telegraph’s Josephine Moulds, DeWolfe then continued, “So we could partner certainly with someone like eBay to do that. We haven’t decided yet but it would be probably a good bet that someone like eBay could be a good partner.” And in terms of a timeframe, this is all “probably six to nine months down the line.”
MySpace isn’t as “hip” as it once was – sites like Facebook and LinkedIn are coming into their prime, and MySpace has gotten a certain “To Catch A Predator” stigma that other social networks have (thus far) dodged. Yet the site still draws in scores of millions of users per month, and could be a very attractive partner for eBay.
“[A] MySpace partnership would represent a huge shot in the arm for eBay’s pending battle with Google,” writes Steve O’Hear for The Social Web. “Forcing MySpace’s gigantic userbase to use eBay-owned PayPal as their means of exchanging money, rather the new kid on the block in Google Checkout, would further extend eBay’s dominance of e-commerce. Right now, eBay users are forced to use PayPal rather than Checkout, and partnering with MySpace extends that monopolistic strategy.”
“This will be one to watch” is a bit of a routine ending for an article. But this potential deal between MySpace and eBay really does deserve our attention, and there may not be any fresh news about it for quite some time, so . . . this will be one to watch.
