J.C.
I really doubt eBay is thinking of advertising as their future business model.
eBay currently has approximately 1.5 billion page views per month right now, and yet derives very little revenue from banners, primarily because they have not tried to sell them.
Have you noticed that with the banners eBay does place, that many of them are for eBay itself?
Yahoo just reported earnings, and averaged approximately 300 million pages views per day, or about 6 times the level of eBay page views.
Yahoo, which derives the vast majority of its revenues from advertising, reported $115M in revenues for the quarter.
If one were to use Yahoo's advertising success rate and apply it to eBay, eBay would end up with about $20M in revenues for the quarter.
However, even with the outage, eBay will end up with $40M plus in revenues for the quarter, with very little from advertising.
I believe eBay has the right model, and that allowing auctions to be posted for free would actually lower the value of eBay.
I also believe the quality of Yahoo's auctions would be improved if they were to start charging fr listings.
When it costs nothing to post (except your time), you end up posting junk, and bidders have to wade through a lot more junk. Also, the bidders are a lot less likely to pay up, treating it like some kind of game.
Anyway, I do believe that eBay should try a little harder to sell more advertising IN ADDITION to their listing fees and commissions. (By the way, the listing fees account for about 2/3 of eBay's revenue.)
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