This week it was reported in the Wall Street Journal that MySpace -Google negotiations hit a roadblock due to MySpace plans to partner with eBay for commerce. Google has its own online commerce ambitions with is relatively new services, Google Base and Google Checkout. But how have those sites been faring since last summer?
Market Share Comparison
According to Hitwise data, last week (week ending 2/3/07) the market share of visits to eBay was 844 times greater than the share of visits to Google Base. Paypal’s market share exceeded Google Checkout’s by 71 to 1 in the same period. Clearly Google Checkout has been doing better than Google Base, thanks to aggressive promotions, which is not something that Google typically does. Windows Live Expo, Microsoft’s Craigslist play, currently has a slightly larger market share than Google Base.
Traffic Growth
Google Base’s market share of visits has declined by 18% when comparing January 2007 to July 2007. Google Checkout’s market share was up 362%, but it remains to be seen if those users will keep coming back. eBay and Paypal showed minor increases of 1.3% and 1.9% respectively in that period. eBay commanded 1.6% of all Internet visits in January 2007, so an incremental 1.3% growth for eBay is almost 10 times larger than Google Base’s entire January market share of 0.0019%.

Session Time
Visiting an online auctions or classifieds site can consume a lot of time. eBay’s average session time last week was almost 20 minutes. Visitors to Craigslist New York, the most visited Craigslist subdomian, had an average session time of nearly 16 minutes. Visitors to just Google search alone stayed more than 12 minutes, while visitors to Google Base stuck around for less than 8 minutes. Google Checkout’s average session time was about 2 minutes shorter than session time for Paypal.

Google Base Clickstream
Last April I did an analysis of the downstream traffic from Google Base in an attempt to surmise what the site was being used for. It’s evolved a bit since then. In January 2007, the top downstream categories of traffic leaving Google Base were:
Real Estate – 16.79%
Employment and Training – 14.84%
Automotive – Classifieds – 7.99%
Food and Beverage – 6.85%
Shopping and Classifieds- 6.03%
Search Engines – 5.92%
If Google Base is primarily being used by house, job, car, and recipe hunters, it doesn’t seem to pose a very big threat to eBay, and is more of a classifieds play on Craigslist. The second most popular site in eBay’s downstream in January was Paypal, at 10.7% (after eBay Motors, at 20.5%), while 4.3% of Google Base’s downstream traffic went to Google Checkout.
The Big Picture
Google and eBay both are getting more traffic from MySpace than ever before. From December 2006 to January 2007, MySpace accounted for 19% more of eBay’s upstream traffic, and 11% more of Google’s upstream traffic. Both MySpace and Google are growing in market share, while Google’s efforts with Base are floundering. Google needs to show that has an e-commerce offering that is even remotely competitive for it to have a say in eBay – MySpace discussions.

Note: www.google.com/base is included in base.google.com, and www.google.com/checkout is included in checkout.google.com.