Who made out in the Google-eBay deal?
Google and eBay may butt heads when it comes to e-commerce, but yesterday they announced a deal that has the two Net giants sharing revenue on search-related text ads delivered on eBay's sites outside of the U.S. They'll also jointly develop "click to call" ads.
The deal shuts out eBay's U.S. advertising partner, Yahoo, and shows that the race is on among Google, MSN and Yahoo to lock in partners. Some aspects of the eBay-Google accord could be more about long-term strategy than short-term cash and some question whether this was a better move for the search giant or the auction king.
Blog community response:
"Skype's current strategy of earning miniscule royalties by licensing its name to hardware makers or earnings pennies of termination minutes might have been great when it was an independent start-up, but as part of a giant like eBay, it doesn't move the needle."
-Om Malik
"What this deal tells me not so much between the lines, is that by working up this deal with Skype, Google is signaling relatively modest plans for Google Talk...in doing deals with a rival that is farther along the PC-to-PSTN infrastructure curve than Google Talk shows any signs of wanting to be, Google is signaling they only want Google Talk to primarily be an IM application--and not get into Internet telephony full-bore."
-Russell Shaw
"This could have been a major coup for Yahoo or Microsoft, but as it stands it's unsurprising that Google landed the deal. Google is willing to go to great lengths to land big advertising deals lately, such as to reportedly giving 90 percent or more of total revenue to select partners like AOL and Ask.com and guaranteeing nearly $1 billion to MySpace."
-Marshall Kirkpatrick
"There are some common threads running through many of the grand alliances among powerful internet companies...Will the coordinated management of those shared interests ultimately come to be more important to these companies than competing with one another? At the moment, that appears to be the trend, and, should it continue, it seems likely that governments, and the public, will begin to take notice."
-nicholas carr
"Wow, this is a huge win for Skype/eBay, but I'm not so sure how much of a win this is for Google...This sounds to me like Skype/eBay negotiated hard with Google and threw Google a 'bone' by agreeing to use Google exclusively outside the U.S...if I go to Skype's online store, I can expect to see a Google Talk button instead of a Skype click-to-call button? Unlikely...There is no mention whether Google would add Skype to the Google Toolbar in return. This would be a huge win for Skype, but would also upset Google's fans that don't hate 'bloatware'...I don't believe Google isn't going to make much "shared revenue" at all as part of this deal--at least in the short term."
--Tom Keating