eBay UK trials more View Item page ads

3/11/2008 at 12:51

eBay UK has announced this morning that it is to trial more third party ad placements on view item pages. The ads will be shown to “less than 1%” of viewers, in the Musical Instruments, MP3 Players and Home Audio / HiFi categories. eBay add that

Goods and services promoted in this sponsored link will not compete with the item for sale on the View Item Page and will be complementary to the View Item Page item whenever possible.

This is not likely to reassure sellers very much: “non-competing” and “complementary” ads have a tendancy to be replaced with ads which do compete with eBay listings, as with the recent appearance of audio book ads on audio book search result pages, and competing off-site ads on ended listing pages.

If eBay is serious about selling ads, targetting is exactly what you’d expect the company to do. You have willing shoppers on a search results page, so why waste space advertising generic, “complementary” products when you know exactly what they’re looking for, and can advertise that to them? eBay is in a pretty unique position to sell advertising: not only does it know what people are looking for, but unlike, say, Google, it’s a pretty safe bet that eBay searches are specifically about looking to buy. If you were eBay, why would you waste the cash-generating potential of all those shoppers?

We can definitely expect the relentless spread of third party ads to continue across the site: eBay goes on to say:

Depending on the results of the test, we will expand the placement to View Item Pages in other categories.

And there’s always the possibility that eBay sellers themselves will be able to buy some of these ads: one of Sky’s banners links back to their BIN listing page: though equally, many sellers would balk at the idea of paying eBay more money for banner advertising when we’re already paying them to sell on the site.

What do you think? If you’re a seller in one of the affected categories, is this a step too far for you? or are you not worried so long as the ads don’t compete directly with you? Leave us a comment.

Updated to add: Click to see full screen shot

This text ad seems to have a picture in it… so much for that particular promise. Others link directly to itunes, so if you don’t have itunes installed on your computer, you get an error page.