Google and eBay inched closer to a turf battle this weekend, with each breaking news of upcoming services that could encroach on the other’s offerings.
Online auctioneer eBay revealed at a software developer conference in Las Vegas that it will debut a contextual ad network that will let advertisers promote their auctions on other sites.
The eBay AdContext network, announced by chief strategy officer Michael van Swaaij on Saturday, will automatically place contextually relevant ads on eBay affiliate sites and in return will give those affiliates a cut of the sales that result from clicking on the ads.
The company currently offers a manual ad delivery platform in which Web publishers manually place ads. The AdContext platform will read Web sites’ content and automatically deliver the most relevant ads based on keywords and categories, and will change those ads as the Web content changes.
Unlike pay-per-click search ads, the eBay AdContext ads will link back only to online auctions on eBay. But observers believe that once the program has gone through its first rollout phase, it could be expanded to place ads for any advertiser on any Web site with relative ease.
Meanwhile, an analyst’s note issued on Friday states that Google will launch an online payment system to rival eBay’s PayPal on June 28. According to Jordan Rohan of RBC Capital Markets, GBuy will handle e-commerce transactions between buyers and merchants. Merchants who use the system will be listed as “trusted GBuy merchants” in Google search results.
Rohan said the new payment platform will generate transaction fees for Google and will also let the company do some conversion tracking on its pay-per-click ads to determine which keywords perform best. He said the service will be offered free during its beta phase, but that Google will eventually charge merchants a 1.5% to 2% commission on sales through GBuy.
In further news out of the eBay developer conference, John Donahoe, president of eBay’s Marketplace division said the company will also release news on Tuesday about Skype, the voice-over-IP phone network it purchased last October. A press report Sunday in Newsweek said the company will encourage eBay auction sellers to add Skype “click to call” links into their Web listings.
“Click to call” technology lets buyers contact sellers directly through IP voice calls or instant messaging.
