25
2006
Yahoo! and eBay: What do the Stats Say?
As I fired up my monitor this morning, I was greeted with a breaking news story by Eric Auchard at Reuters, detailing a broad alliance between Yahoo! and eBay.
My first reaction… I need a scorecard to keep track of all the deals/alliances being announced in the portal-search space. My second reaction was (question actually)… what is the impact of a Yahoo!-eBay deal to Google? Being the numbers guy that I am, I of course immediately pulled some stats (the numbers below are based on U.S. Internet visitors).
First, eBay is the #1 shopping site downstream from Google (with Google sending about 1% of its traffic to eBay). On the other side, eBay provides about 2.4% of Google’s traffic. Depending on the breadth of the Yahoo! eBay deal, will Google loose incoming traffic on the upstream and advertising revenue on the downstream?
Here’s a table of the top retail sites visited immediately after Google:
The other question: Is Google a competitive threat? I don’t think I need to address the competitive threat that Google poses to Yahoo! as that is crystal clear, the more interesting question is: Is Google a competitive threat to eBay.
If we consider Google Base as the competitive threat, it has yet to gain traction in the auction space. At Hitwise we have over 18,000 sites in our Shopping & Classifieds category, eBay ranks #1 in category for market share of visits with just over 20% of visits to the category, Google Base ranks #2,158 with .004% for the same category. The greater competitive concern from eBay’s perspective is most likely to be Google Sponsored Listings as a competitive substitute to online auctions for small business.
I’m interested to hear your thoughts…
You’re doing a great job with these posts, Bill. Very helpful. My view is that people who leave eBay to do a search on Google aren’t very likely to do a search on Yahoo just because there might be a link to Yahoo on eBay (and I don’t even think that was announced).
Bill,
1) I completely agree with your view about Google Base being a *Substitue* for eBay’s online auctions business.
2) The threat is “real” though not quantitatively big (rank 2158) for eBay right now. Google would eventually drive a lot of search traffic to Google Base as it builds that property. eBay – Yahoo alliance is a pre emptive strike. So the Impact on Google would be mid-long term rather than immediate as I have posted on my blog http://www.thebizofcoding.com/2006/05/dot_com_war_20_ebay_inc_yahoo.html
3) The next Google impact is a clear Question mark on what I call Google’s haphazard product strategy http://www.thebizofcoding.com/2006/04/googles_strategy_anyone.html . Google has positioned itself as a provider of a horizontal technology : Search. That means they tell other businesses. “Trust us for Web Search. Give your Web Search Ad business to us.” However, their very attempts to go into Content and Commerce business is against their Positioning as a Search Engine. If you build content and commerce around Search — why would other online businesses in Content and Commerce give you their Search advertising business?
4) Industry realignment is the final Google Impact. That means how will Microsoft, AOL, Amazon respond and how that realignment will impact Google http://www.thebizofcoding.com/2006/05/yahoo_inc_ebay_inc_alliance_ho.html
I think that the mid to long-term impact on Google of the Yahoo-eBay alliance is quite significant.
Ujwal