Yahoo, a new Ebay partner?
A multi-year agreement has been made between Yahoo and eBay to bundle many of the two company’s services together.
Mick Weinstein of Seeking Alpha precedes his summary of blogosphere reactions with this noe. “Note that JP Morgan Securities had a report (.pdf) out just two days ago predicting such a eBay-Yahoo alliance as the most likely deal of its kind among the big internet players.”
Thoughts: I think this is liable to be seen as a less obtrusive partnership than some other search engine/other vendor deals. As far as I know, nobody’s computer or even browser comes with Yahoo or eBay baked-in top-level (Firefox Yahoo inclusion is substantially more low key than that of Google) so I think this is going to be received as an extension of voluntary use.
Second, I’m not sure how limited the possibilities are here. Will people start using Flickr to upload their photos for eBay? Will future auctions be promoted on Upcoming.org? Maybe I’m being silly here, but the point is that Yahoo’s recent torrent of feature-add-by-acquisition offers a lot of creative potential for a partnership with a huge player like eBay/PayPal/Skype.
Some people have said this is just a trial balloon, that these two companies are really competitors, etc. But in the face of Google’s success and Microsoft’s largess I can’t imagine that Yahoo and eBay wouldn’t be able to work out some really powerful collaboration. The fact that Yahoo gets more page views than any other site online, has acquired so much hippness and yet is the dark horse in this space is amazing.
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