In the past 12 months, Amazon.com has beaten eBay as far as traffic is concerned. The number of unique visitors to Amazon.com surpassed eBay in November and December 2008, January 2009, but Amazon is now also beating eBay in unique visitors in the month of September. Actually, eBay is having its worst September in 5 years in terms of traffic, both in unique visitors to the site and number of page views.
The decline in visitors is largely due to Google’s algorhythm pushing all eBay pages down in the rankings for organic searches. Our guess is that it’s also the fact that the website has an enourmous amount of duplicate pages that makes it loosing inbound traffic from Google. Not all that surprising as Google is not handling eBay any different than any other website with too much duplicate content.
Next to this, eBay is no longer that ‘cool’ website to hang around. It’s lost its social function and people tend to visit the site just when they are in need of something. On Amazon for example you can talk about a release and it will not get whiped out whereas eBay is cleaning up its database once an item has sold. Gone is the listing and gone is the possibility to have a release reviewed. Not that eBay ever had this function.
eBay also made the ’smart’ move to change its conditions for affiliates which made that its biggest affiliate (Shoppingads.com, formerly known as Auctionads.com) had to shut down its service since they were unable to handle the quality traffic rules that eBay imposed. It’s rather unsure if eBay will be able to recoup all those lost ’souls’. ‘Quality’ in the eyes of eBay means new visitors, excluding those who bring too much recurrent visits from its partnernetwork.
From a seller’s point of view, eBay is no longer the traffic builder as it used to be. Less traffic means less sales and also eBay is struck by the crisis whith less people looking for CDs. But it also has a problem with the items offered on the site. More and more labels are closing their accounts because of eBay’s fee policy which makes eBay not exactly the cheapest way to complete orders. eBay is namely charging sellers per product offered on the site. Amazon to name just one competitor gives you a free ride until your product is actually sold which is rather encouraging and diminishing the risk for sellers.
And we haven’t even spoken about eBay’s support being close to unexistant.
Now, as an eBay seller myself I do have a problem with the fact that I still have to pay the same amount even when eBay is loosing traffic. I pay eBay and in return I want the traffic to get my stuff sold. When a company underdelivers you have the right to ask your money back, not so with eBay. Sold or not sold, you cannot get your money back, you get a second change to resell your product and that’s it.
The rescue for eBay as far incoming Google traffic could well be a joined venture with the Discogs.coms of this world. For its CD section allone it would result in everlasting reviews and listings in Google increasing enormously the inbound links coming from Google. In fact, doing this would result in 3 to 4 times more links than what the CD section of Amazon would ever be able to hold due to the enourmous variety of versions of one single album for instance.
The decline in visits should also stimulate eBay to diminish its costs or in the best case just start with free listings and charge more for additional options or charge more once a product is sold. Actually, why not charge extra those not using ‘cashcow’ PayPal as an obliged paying option?
In the past 12 months, Amazon.com has beaten eBay as far as traffic is concerned. The number of unique visitors to Amazon.com surpassed eBay in November and December 2008, January 2009, but Amazon is now also beating eBay in unique visitors in the month of September. Actually, eBay is having its worst September in 5 years in terms of traffic, both in unique visitors to the site and number of page views.
The decline in visitors is largely due to Google’s algorithm pushing all eBay pages down in the rankings for organic searches. Our guess is that it’s also the fact that the website has an enormous amount of duplicate pages that makes it loosing inbound traffic from Google. Not all that surprising as Google is not handling eBay any different than any other website with too much duplicate content.
At the moment Last.fm, Pandora, Spotify and Rhapsody (plus all related companies) are paying to stream content to people when they already have that song locally. “Criminal” says Last.fm co-founder Richard Jones in a chat with 
).
YouTube is loosing money at a fast pace of millions of dollars per month. To counter this and rake in a few millions extra to fill the pit, the Google owned videohub has improved its premium ‘Promoted Videos’ feature. Promoted Videos gives you the possibility to expose your video to other users, whilst paying for it that is. Not only has the platform gone through an integration with Adwords, Promoted Videos can now also be used/ordered in Canada, France, the UK, Italy, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands next to the US.