eBay Investor's  Instablog

I was fortunate enough to attend the Apple last month at the Yerba Buena  Convention center in San Francisco.  Apple showed off the new iTunes 9.0, the new iPod Nano (with Camera), talked about new games for the iTouch and lastly the touted the new LP product that has full multimedia capabilities for albums.  One thing that you won’t hear about in the plethora of articles is the new digital book/art territory that Apple is embarking.

Apple is now in the comic book business.  I talked to co-creator, singer and actor Tyrese Gibson about his latest creation which you won’t hear anywhere else.  A new comic originally published by Image Comics title Mayhem!  is hitting online iTunes clients now.  With rich content, narration by Tyrese and friends (such as his pastor as an example) give an exciting and fresh approach to bring comic books into this century.  Extras such as sketches, videos and the sort of multimedia content you’d expect from say a Blu-Ray of a popular movie are all yours for the reasonable sum of 1.99.  There is even music that Tyrese himself recorded on the package.   Tyrese hopes that there will be crossover  appeal to non-traditional comic book fans with this offering.

The co-creator surprisingly is not a long time comic book fan.  It was Tyrese’s  trip to Comic-Con in San Diego that really ignited his passion for the genre.  With his partner Jack Le, who also manages his film production firm, they embarked on this new product – with the hopes that the same hand inked pages that riveted so many in the baby boomer generation and spark yet again for the gen Y crowd.

Mayhem!  Is the title of the comic series and it takes place in Los Angeles.  Its story centers on a crime fighting vigilante that (of course) has a arch nemesis whose common link is yet to be revealed.

Co-creater William Wilson (Gi Front Line UTF, Urban Monsters) expounded on his passion for comics and his privilege of delivering this age old medium to the contemporary.    All the people involved sounded very excited as they spear-head this new medium, and I was impressed by the artwork, videos and storyline they have worked so hard to create.  This could be the citizen cane moment for online –comics

Speaking with artist Tone Rodriguez, he lamented on the slowly dying comic book store format as a sign of the times, and showing that this new format can hopefully reverse the trend and re invigorate the market.  This has interesting implications to the whole digital content realm as well, as Apple starts moving more into Amazon’s territory.  It is no doubt that color successor for Kindle is just a engineer’s task away, however Apple is taking a untraditional and clever lunge at Amazon’s marketplace.

Stay Tuned for more exciting things, and try out Mayhem!  For $2.00 it’s quite a bargain.

eBay Getting its Groove Back?

Investors have been very optimistic about eBay’s prospects.   Today the stock is hovering around $22.00 – more than doubling since it’s March 9^th low of $9.91. eBay’s 2nd quarter earnings looked promising and the metrics look like eBay is finally capitalizing on the weak economy.

eBay stock price since March 9th, 2009

I wanted to provide data that would give investors as much information about eBay so they can make educated decisions about their investments.

First, let me post here my own tables showing quarterly and annual revenue growth statistics.


As you can see, revenue started contracting in the Q3 of 2008.  This trend was not reversed until this most recent quarter when eBay's management was finally able to stem the bleeding - an impressive feat in this economy.  I base my Q3 and Q4 forecasts on the 2.51% sequential growth trend of Q2



Annually you see that eBay is on track to record a slight decrease in revenue.  Again, this is based on the current trajectory from Q2.  If eBay continues to execute and produce a strong Q3 and Q4 - we may see record revenues for 2009 which would be huge for the eBay investment community.  There is a lot of opportunity here - with the marketplaces improving and Paypal/Skype growing healthily - it is a big possibility

Make sure you take advantage of eBay’s own investor page.

http://investor.ebay.com/

eBay’s investor page has more then just regular earnings reports.  Detailed PowerPoint decks and investor presentations are stored here.

One of the more essential presentations was the presentation eBay gave for analyst day.  It's a large powerpoint deck (over 200 slides)

2009 Analyst Presentation (14 megs)

Another great site is Medved.net eBay Auction Counts.  The site is a treasure trove of information and monitors eBay’s pages 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, at 1.5 hour intervals for their auction counts and now, the sell-through statistics.

A look at the 2009 auction counts show a huge increase in listings.  This is especially positive since the 2^nd and 3^rd quarter traditional have been eBay’s weakest and usually have a drop in listings.  Having growth during these times is I believe a testament to eBay’s counter-cyclical nature.  Some people have called eBay “recession proof”  I believe as the economy continues to struggle and more and more people are out of work – that old doohickey that they bought during the boom times are getting listed on eBay – conversely, people with limited budgets wouldn’t mind a “like new” doo-dad if they can save some extra money. 

The next sites that are useful are traffic rankings for ebay’s properties.  You should always use different sources to come to a sort of “average” traffic ranking since ranking sites you their own type of data gathering.  More often then not, the true ranking lies somewhere between different sites.

 
The two I use are

Alexa.com



Neilson Online



For Skype usage is called The Borderless Communicator is essential

This site records a huge amount of user information and has shown steady cyclical growth for Skype

I hope readers of this posting find this information useful.


Disclosure: Long eBay