Archive for November, 2008
The eBay Syndrome
eBay has recently seen a sharp drop in traffic as they cut their affiliate stream and Google ad spend.
When you are a default category leader you no longer compete against others in your category. You compete against other categories. Google and Amazon.com understand that. Microsoft maybe. eBay no.
eBay could have used the last decade to create communities around buying, selling, and collecting…taking a slice of any transaction as they turn buyers to sellers or sellers to buyers.
- They could have offered awards for collector of the month, seller of the month, buyer of the month, and done interviews with the winners.
- They could have a section called deal hunting where they offer tips on how to find the best deals.
- They could have a section called “good as new” where people talk where people talk about old items that are a bargain, and in some cases even better than new.
- They could have allowed sellers and buyers to build editorial communities and collections on the eBay site. Control the conversation and control commerce.
- What if eBay could have got you to tag just about everything you owned, and then told you roughly what it was worth (based on recent transaction data) and had you put a buy it now price on it? CueCat was a failure, but eBay has a much better platform to market such a device on.
Instead they did nothing. They lost a decade to improvements in search, Amazon.com, open source software, blogs, and the rest of the web.
Rather than improving their network feedback mechanism and making a deeper network, the new eBay strategy is to try to be more like Amazon, but that won’t work. While eBay spent a decade alienating buyers and sellers (with no innovation, shifting fees, encouraging a market lemons, etc.), Amazon was off building user loyalty. And now Amazon is out working public relations with a holiday customer review team and extending their platform in new dimensions - offering digital downloads, the Kindle, selling utility computing, and selling their shopping platform.
Staying competitive is more of a mindset than an event. The decay happens long before it impacts revenue. And by the time it impacts revenue there isn’t a lot of time to fix things.
Do You Yahoo?
I was doing some research on Yahoo yesterday and it got me thinking does anyone really use yahoo that seriously for business?
I have 2 of my own sites that rank really well on Yahoo for terms that convert well on Google yet I recall 1 conversion in say the last 2 years that came from [...]
Follow me on Twitter
Are you using Twitter? then I’d love it if you followed me!
If your not using it yet then why not give it a go and see how easy it is to get your own network going and keep them up to date with what you are up to.
Google’s User Data Empire
I’ve been holding off on doing this entry for a bit, but with the introduction of SearchWiki their aims are so clear to me, I just can’t hold off anymore. Google’s problems over the past 2 years have been the result of an algorithm ov…
Duplicate Sites
Do you spam the search engines?
Now before you say no consider this. Many companies will have a UK and US presence and so have a .com and .co.uk website address. This is fine and a good idea but now is when it normally goes wrong.
Instead of having the website hosted on one of the website [...]
Glync Tracking 25,000 URLs
I will stop writing about Glync for a few posts after this, but I just wanted to announce that we recently surpassed 25,000 URLs being tracked via Glync. The Glync Firefox Extension allows you to add historical graphs to your Google Webmaster Tools external link tracker. Instead of just seeing how many links now, you [...]
Viral Marketing Idea Friday - House Keeping Service
I am sorry that its been a few Fridays since the last post, but things (as always) have been crazy hectic. I am sorry because that is no excuse, but its a real one. A few weeks ago I ran into a friend that just launched a chandler house cleaning business and we [...]
Blog About Glync for Pro Upgrades
Hey folks, thanks to all of you who decided to download and install the new Glync Firefox Extension. Right now we are tracking over 17,000 unique pages and the number is growing rapidly!
I did want to give everyone the opportunity to get a chance to look at the Glync Professional Version. So, in exchange [...]
flutrends
Applied meme tracking and analysis by Google:
“We’ve found that certain search terms are good indicators of flu activity. Google Flu Trends uses aggregated Google search data to estimate…
[[ This is an excerpt. Visit blackhat-seo.com for…
javascript obfuscation: Whitespace
Cool javascript obfuscation technique presented at Defcon, called Whitespace. Read and download.
[[ This is an excerpt. Visit blackhat-seo.com for the full post. ]]