Yahoo, eBay to work together on several projects
Jason Miller of WebProNews called it the eBiz bombshell; it certainly is one. Amidst all the rumors of MSN and Yahoo partnering together (which Yahoo seemed to dismiss almost disdainfully), Yahoo & eBay have quietly sprung a big surprise. Below is what Jason wrote for the daily newsletter.
“eBay and Yahoo dropped an announcement bomb early this morning saying that the two Internet giants have agreed to combine their efforts on a number of projects. By 2007, expect an increase in eBay search results on Yahoo!, an increase of contextual text and graphical ads on eBay, PayPal to power Yahoo! Wallet, a co-branded eBay Toolbar, and click-to-call advertising using Yahoo! Messenger with Voice and Skype.”
Quite a heady combination of search, advertising, commerce and voice communication.
The developments are unlikely to be fully in effect until next year and even then, it seems that the advertising/ cross-promotion partnerships will be limited to the United States.
Meg Whitman has previously called the acquisition of PayPal one of eBay’s best acquisitions and this is being proved again, as not only will Yahoo benefit with the use of PayPal for all of its payment processing but also PayPal/eBay with the volume of online transactions that Yahoo gets across its various web properties.
While very high profile, there’s still quite a bit of mystery as to how Skype is fitting into the whole eBay set up — slowly even that is beginning to make sense.
However, when such big players decide to partner together, the sceptic in me can’t help but have a few doubts. For example, how does this close relationship between the two companies impact eBay affiliates? One could well argue that with the additional promotional opportunities, affiliates will stand to benefit owing to more traffic and probably more conversions. Likewise, will Yahoo’s search results page (whether paid or organic) lose some more of its “neutrality” (it’s algorithmic results are already “compromised” to some extent with its paid inclusion program) as a result of promoting more results from eBay?
