auctions
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Remember EBay? Traffic at Auction Site Keeps Falling
According to Ina Steiner from AuctionBytes, eBay experienced a major drop in traffic over the last few months. Based on data from Nielsen, Steiner concludes that eBay's page views in May 2009 dropped 32% compared to May 2008, and compared to May 2005, page views were down by 40%. With a 7% drop from May 2008 to May 2009, the unique visitor numbers show a slightly less dramatic decline, but things are clearly not going too well for eBay right now.
YouTube Puts Placement for User Videos Up For Auction
This is so cynical it just might work. Google announced this afternoon that YouTube will now allow video publishers, no matter who they are, to bid for sponsored placement for their videos on the site. The program will be based on Adsense technology and is essentially just that - paid search results for user published videos.
This is a radical opening of the previously white-listed YouTube monetization strategies. Have you made a video of your band performing its new single, or your company's new product demonstration or your nonprofit group's expose of corporate misbehavior? If you'd like to have that video highlighted on the site, now you can - for a price. What price? What can you bid?
EBay Buys Bill Me Later and DBA - Lays Off 1,000
EBay today announced that it will acquire U.S. based online payments business Bill Me Later and the Danish classifieds site dba.dk. For Bill Me Later, eBay paid approximately $820 million in cash and $125 in outstanding options, while it acquired the Danish sites for $390 in cash. At the same time, eBay also announced that it plans to reduce its workforce by 10 percent.
EBay Just Wants to Sell: Moving Away From Auctions
Today, eBay announced a number of changes to its fee structure, which will emphasize fixed-price sales over eBay's traditional auctions. Fixed-price sales have been growing at a faster rate than auctions for eBay, so emphasizing this business model makes a lot of sense for eBay. To do so, the company has reduced the price to list an item for a fixed price by over 70% to 35 cents and sellers can now list multiple quantities of the same item for the same price.
Australia Rules Against eBay and PayPal
In April, eBay filed a notification with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) seeking permission to circumvent section 47 of the Australian Trade Practices Act of 1974, which disallows businesses from creating exclusive deals that have the purpose or effect of lessening competition, in order to more fully integrate PayPal into its operations. As the ACCC put its, "Generally speaking, [the Act prohibits] exclusive dealing involves one business trading with another person, imposing restrictions on their freedom to choose with whom, or in what, it deals." Today, the ACCC released a draft notice denying eBay's request.
Trouble at eBay
"I think [fixed prices] will disappear online, simply because it is possible - cheap and easy - to vary prices online." That was MIT Media Lab's Patti Maes in 1999, at a time when eBay's business was booming and auctions were seen as the future of ecommerce. Flash forward 9 years, and BusinessWeek is today calling online auctions a dying breed, Nick Carr is wondering if auctions were a fad. Indeed, the fixed price ("Buy it Now" only) format is beginning to dominate eBay, and the company has taken recent steps push fixed price even harder. But the death knell of the online auction format is not eBay's biggest problem -- no, that would be the small exodus of sellers from the site.
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