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Technology Stocks : eBay - Superb Internet Business Model -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tom Hua who wrote (2247)	3/14/1999 4:34:00 PM
From: Doug Fowler	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 7772

Hi Tom: That is an interesting statistic. eBay used to report the number of page views daily, and now they report them monthly. As a result, I've gotten the impression that they are pretty lax about them. I recall them being 14M a day sometime last quarter, but now they have been reporting 600M page views a month for a while. I know that auction count growth has shown a very high correlation to revenue growth over the past two reported quarters, and I believe it will show a high correlation this quarter as well, which is why I predict the 60 percent increase. As far as the listing fees not helping revenue much: I have been under the impression that listing fees make up about half of revenue for eBay. Sure, you can get it for as low as 25 cents, but the basic fee can also be 50 cents, one dollar or two dollars (depending on the starting bid or reserve price you set). Bolding fees are two dollars, featured category auctions are now $14.95, featured auctions are $99.95, and they even charge $1 for putting a special symbol next to your listing (like a heart or a clover). Here's another factor to think about: over the long-term, you would think sellers would be less likely to pay to list with eBay if their items aren't selling, and more likely to list if their items are selling. Anyway, you bring up a very important point which is the foundation for the past, current and future success of eBay. It is all about traffic, the traffic of serious sellers and serious buyers. If eBay attracts too many sellers without a corresponding buyer pick-up, big problems will occur. I recently spent $100 to run a Showcase auction on Auction Universe. (I have been running featured auctions for the same product on eBay for the past few months.) I thought Auction Universe was worth a try, because there were only 15 items featured in the Showcase. I figured, sure, traffic won't be as high as with eBay, but with so few items in the Showcase (compared to about 600 in the eBay featured area), I would get a lot of attention. I got 3 bids in two weeks on Auction Universe. I don't know exactly how many page views I got, because they don't provide a way to track it, but using traffic statistics to my site, Auction Universe wasn't even showing up on the radar. The same exact auction on eBay produced almost 1000 page views and more than a dozen bids. And it brought a lot of traffic to our site. In fact, a single featured auction on eBay accounts for about half of the traffic to our home page. I can tell you this: if I believed that eBay was only going to show a 12 to 15 percent revenue increase this quarter, I would short it like there was no tomorrow. Good luck, Doug