Auction giant eBay announced that they will soon be rolling out a contextual ad service that will feature eBay auctions. Contextualized by the keywords on a publishers page, the ads will then show relevant auctions on eBay. A tech site, for instance, might show ads for used iPods.
Unlike Adsense and YPN, eBay Adcontext will pay publishers based on resulting sales instead of clicks. The payment will be decided by the purchase price and will be in the range of 40-70 percent of the sale.
This could be a double boon for some of us. Publishers like myself could see an added bit of revenue from a new model and eBay sellers like myself could see an added bit of traffic to our auctions resulting in higher sell rates and possibly higher final values.
There are a couple of questions burning in my head right now that will need clarification if this is going to take off.
- Both Adsense and YPN have TOS’s that require a publisher to not have any other contextual ads running on the site. Will a contextual ad that only links to eBay, a place where neither Adsense or YPN go, violate those TOS’s?
- eBay also announced and rolled out it’s eBay Express product recently. Will the only auctions that get ads be the ones in eBay Express? Or, more importantly, what will be the determining factor in which auctions get top billing and which don’t?
- Will fixed price auctions be included? How about Store Inventory?
- Will the ads be cookied? Or, rather, will someone that clicks through but makes the purchase later still count for me? I can see this being a major glitch if it doesn’t work this way.
- Will payment be made by PayPal? I can only assume so. That’s ok with me, just asking. 😉
Is there anyone from eBay, Google, or YPN out there that can answer those? I’m sure it will come out soon enough, but inquiring minds want to know.
Technorati Tags: google, ypn, yahoo publishing network, ebay, ebay adcontext, contextual ads, adsense, TOS, ebay auctions, ebay express, auction ads
About Shane Ede
Recent Comments