Many of you may have heard earlier this year about eBay's deal with Yahoo in which Yahoo will be the main supplier of text based ads in the United States.
Well, today eBay decided to take it one step further and signed a deal with Google. Google will now essentially serve ads to eBay users who search for something on the Auction's Giant website. For example if you do a search for hardware stores on eBay, and your search returns zero results, you will be served (a la Google) some ads that match your query, thus enabling to click on these ads.
The service will be rolled out internationally, to eBay's non-US sites. It will also allow localized ads served, which is done pretty easily considering all the information eBay requires from its users when they register.
Oh and as a nice supplement to the deal, eBay and Google will also be working together in order to help build Skype as well as VOIP. Users will be able to click on text-based ads on Google, and immediately be connected to the merchants who are selling their wares online, and speak to them via Skype.
Wow. Unbelievable deal for both eBay and Google. Oh yeah, and congratulations to Yahoo too. It should be interesting to see what happens when one of these parties eventually gets sick of the three-way deal and demands that eBay choose one loyal partner (Come on, you know this is bound to happen).
One last thought - where is Microsoft in all of this? Does their search suck that bad that after years of working with them (reasearch eBay and MSFT Passport deal in early 2000-2001) eBay just gave them the finger and turned to the current champions of search?
Monday, August 28, 2006
eBay's Three-Way
Posted by Ben Wilkinson at 7:49 PM
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