eBay on paid search (quotes from the 1Q05 conf call)

eBay (ticker: EBAY) CFO  Rajiv Dutta  went out of his way to comment on the paid search market on the company's Q1 earnings results conference call:

Let me take just a moment to talk about the trends we are seeing in Internet marketing. First, it should be noted that the vast majority of eBay's users arrive directly without going through another Website first and this group is growing. Among the rest, marketing has proven to be a useful tool for user activity as well as user acquisition. In terms of traffic that we've paid for, affiliates remain a very productive avenue for us and we have been increasing our investment in this area. Natural search has continued to grow as a source of traffic and we are focusing on increasing effort on optimizing our abilities over here. While paid search remains an important channel, paid search costs remained less than 5% of U.S. revenues.

(Quotes are from the CCBN StreetEvents transcript.)