eBay teams up with Google
eBay & Google announced a partnership in which Google is the exclusive provider of text-based ads to eBay’s international properties. Yahoo has struck a similar deal with eBay in the US, but with the difference that Yahoo will be able to provide image based advertising as well and will support PayPal as a payment platform, according to the Financial Times.
This seems to be yet another big deal for Google, especially after reaching an agreement with MySpace. After Microsoft has signed a deal with Facebook, it’s clear that search engines are grabbing for traffic to support their advertiser base with web properties. One big difference between the eBay & Google partnership however is, that displaying advertising to eBay users is probably of much higher value than displayong it to a roaming MySpace crowd. Ebay customers are willing to spend money and clearly searching for products, so the value to Google advertisers of having their ads thrown up infront of those users is high.
To be honest, though, I think this is rather bad news for the search marketing space - competition is healthy for bringing out innovative products. And when checking Google’s product offering, specifically AdWords & their API, it has been a follower rather than an innovator. The incentive to innovate is likely to decrease as market share of Google increases, so in the long-run that might leaves marketers with relatively poor products they have to deal with.
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