Well, it seems that contrary to my speculation in my previous post, E-bay’s move to stop affiliates using Adwords paid search advertising had absolutely nothing to do with the auction giant looking to reduce costs on its in-house PPC by removing affiliates from the Adwords arena.
The two online giants are apparently having a bit of a lover’s tiff over E-bay’s refusal to discuss providing Google Checkout as a payment option for E-bay’s online buyers and sellers. Google checkout is a direct competitor to E-bay’s own in-house payment system - Paypal.
In response to this, Google planned a party named “Let Freedom Ring” to promote Google Checkout on the same day as Ebay’s own event, E-Bay Live. The aim was to bypass E-bay and promote Google Checkout amongst the seller community in order to create some support for the adoption of their own payment system. E-bay sellers can be an influential bunch, and have successfully campaigned for change in the past.
As soon as E-bay caught wind of this, they were naturally quite perturbed, with a spokeswoman commenting, “We don’t view that kind of activity as an appropriate activity for one partner to do to another.” Ebay then switched off all of their Adwords US advertising. Ouch. In response, Google have now cancelled their party but there is still a wide ranging outbreak of “petted lips” amongst various executives at E-bay and Google towers.
It’ll be interesting to see how this one pans out! Thanks to Rob At MarketingDrome for dropping me a wee e-mail about this one.
Read more here: -
ZD Net
Searchengine Land
Discussion at Webmaster World
