leapingcat

Why Advertising Is Failing on the Internet

If the sole purpose of advertising was to impart information about a product or service then the outlook for it would indeed be bleak. But much advertising is about something more, for example suggesting that you will have a higher status by using a company's products. Traditional advertising has achieved this by the choice of media, images portrayed, etc, but somehow this seems missing from on-line advertising. Perhaps a different model, looking at a target market rather than linking to content would be more effective, but I leave it better minds than mine to put the flesh on the bones.

What Will Become of eBay?

This article shows that merely analysing figures without trying to understand them is not a very good idea. Once you look a bit deeper it is no surprise that an increase in listings has been followed by a decrease in traffic. Ebay have discriminated against their traditional sellers in favour of the so-called Diamond Power Sellers with their inferior listings both in terms of income per item and desirability.
Let us look in a bit more detail at that allegation that auctions are falling out of favour and fixed price sales are booming. Auction sales may be down slightly, I'm quite happy to accept the 8% figure, but that is hardly surprising from the number of sellers who have left in disgust at Ebay's policies rather than there own downturn in sales. The Medved figures actually show that in the categories that are traditionally dominated by auctions, auction sell-through rates have remained consistently high, and in collectables have actually increased from approximately 40% to approximately 50% over the last three months. On the other hand the sell-through rates for fixed price listings for books, one of the categories that the likes of buy.com have moved into has plummeted from about 45% to about 15%.
These figures are not difficult to obtain, yet I have always found that an analysis based purely on numbers can never give a satisfactory answer to the question as to whether to invest in a company and if so at what price. On that basis I would not invest in Ebay at any price as long as the current policies and management are in place.