Insider Chatter by Donna Bogatin

Will Henry Blodget be Yahoo’s biggest mistake under the Jerry Yang tenure? Considering Blodget’s latest five-paragraph thesis hails: “eBay, Time For Meg Whitman To Go?” Jerry Yang may very well be the next Blodget big-ticket headline fodder! 

Despite trying my hardest to ignore the “disgraced Wall Street analyst,” (as per Blodget fan Valleywag), the SEC fined, ex-Merrill Lynch employee, and his Kevin Ryan financed “Silicon Alley Insider (SAI),” surfaces at every Internet corner, particulalry the incestuous ones!

WHAT “Silicon Alley Insider?” I have been analyzing since that fateful Summer day when Blodget decided he was tired of being an “Internet Outsider.” Blodget and SAI company are trying their darndest to be percieved as New York-Wall Street “insiders,” despite that Blodget is banned for life from the real Wall Street.

The latest SAI stunt–”Silicon Alley 100″–proudly waives its brown nosing on its Web sleeve: New York City Mayor Bloomberg is given number one honors and his photo decorates the SAI pages, NYC-based powerhouse IAC CEO Barry Diller is runnerup, and prodigious SAI link-swapper, SAI Twitter partner, and SAI columnist Union Square Venture Fred Wilson weighs in with a respectful SAI Bronze position, earning him a photo lead as well.

Where does Yahoo fit into the SAI picture? According to Valleywag and TechCrunch, Blodget is to host a “TechTicker” finance video show for Yahoo starting in January.

Yahoo may have missed some recent SAI Blodget Yahoo “reports”:

“The Real Reason Yahoo’s Revenue Per Search Stinks”

“Google Great, Yahoo a Mess”

“Yahoo Lights On, Nobody Home”

WILL HENRY BLODGET SOON BE CALLING FOR YAHOO CEO JERRY YANG’S HEAD, VIA YAHOO’S OWN TECHTICKER???? 

PASS THE PEANUT BUTTER!

MORE: Henry Blodget 2.0: Silicon Alley Outsider Trolls Again

Blodget & Ryan: Cool, or Suck? WHAT Silicon Alley ‘Insider’!

Henry Blodget Has Internet Boom Lessons For NBC

Henry Blodget: Mary Meeker Pulls a Blodget on Google

FOUND: Vintage Henry Blodget Math! AMZN, anyone?

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN

eBay’s Marketplace business unit “delivered record net revenues of nearly $1.32 billion in Q3 2007″ Meg Whitman, CEO, announced yesterday.

No great financial thanks to eBay’s classifieds inititiatives, such as the newly launched “free” Kijiji, apparently, however:

Let me spend a minute on the results from our Classifieds business. Our global multi-brand Classifieds portfolio continued its rapid growth this quarter, posting triple-digit operating and financial metrics in many markets. Monthly unique visitors to these sites are up nearly 200% year over year, and more than 135,000 new ads are being added each day.

As we mentioned last quarter, we launched Kijiji in the U.S. to more than 200 cities at the end of June. After just three months, there are more than 100,000  (FREE) live ads available at any time. We continue to be very excited about our Classifieds business. While it’s still relatively small, it is showing extraordinary promise…

While these businesses are currently lower-margin businesses for the most part, they are still relatively new and hold great promise for revenue growth and operating margin expansion in the future.

Whitman may be “very excited” about the “extraordinary progress” of Kijiji and eBay classifieds initiatives, but Wall Street analysts didn’t give them the time of day during the earnings call: No questions about current or furture eBay performance in classifieds.

What about eBay’s other (minority interest) classifieds play, Craigslist?

FOR MORE READ INSIDER CHATTER KIJIJI LAUNCH REPORT: eBay Kijiji NOT Craigslist Killer: Top Ten Reasons

PLUS eBay CEO on KIJIJI LAUNCH: eBay CEO: Kijiji NO Craigslist, Google NOT Best ROI

ALSO EXCLUSIVE INSIDER CHATTER INTERVIEWS: Craigslist Q & A: Classifieds Community NO ‘Walled Garden’ and Craigslist’s Craig Newmark: ‘My life is a sitcom’ and Oodle CEO Q & A on eBay, Kijiji & Craigslist Classifieds

PLUS: Google Q3 Planetary Gains: Every Country AND The Cloud

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN

Buy.com announces a three-way with Facebook and eBay, aiming to usurp eBay personal selling leadership.

Dubbed “Garage Sale,” Buy.com heralds it is “putting Internet selling power in the hands of consumers” via ecommerce capability embedded within personal profile pages on social networking sites.”

First up, Facebook.:

For the first time ever, goods can be bought directly on the profile page, and purchasers never have to leave the page to complete the purchase transaction. With Garage Sale, consumers no longer need to pay listing charges associated with online auction sites, and they can take advantage of significantly lower individual transaction fees.

The Garage Sale capability is currently available to Facebook users, and Buy.com plans to roll out the service to users on other online social networks shortly. Facebook users simply add the Garage Sale feature from Facebook’s application suite and upload product information and photos to begin selling on their personal profile pages using Garage Sale’s secure transaction capability.

Buy.Com CEO Neel Grover on the opportunity: “We see tremendous growth opportunities in providing the millions of users on business and social networks with an alternative to eBay, and the ability to transform their personal profile pages beyond information-sharing.”

In good Web 2.0 coopetition fashion, Buy.com needs eBay to compete with it, though: Widely used eBay’s PayPal will help power payment processing.

Facebook has some big, bad coopetition issues of its own, with the arrival of Garage Sale on Facebooker profiles. The Buy.com personal selling meets social networking venture is but the latest individual commercial option available within Facebook, following a recent string of conflicting Facebook social selling initiatives including Oodle Classifieds Group on Facebook and Facebook’s own “Facebook Marketplace.”

Upon the launch of “Facebook Marketplace,” I underscored that by not committing to a single, unified personal selling offering, Facebook not only dilutes its own position in the marketplace, it fragments Facebook users’ commercial demand.

The “Facebook Marketplace,” according to Facebook:

Make it easy for people who share real-life connections to discover listings and sell items among friends and within their networks. Marketplace is about individuals selling or seeking items within Facebook networks.

The Facebook embedded Buy.com “Garage Sale,” according to Gene Alvarez, Gartner:

Anyone who has ever asked a friend if they knew someone who would buy their stuff understands the power of that sales model. when you add the Internet’s community, collaboration and sales capabilities, we will see yet another transformation of e-commerce and the dawn of online social selling.

Mark Zuckerberg dismissed any need to directly monetize “Facebook Marketplace” when it launched; He also dismissed any need for Facebook to share in any monetization achieved by third-party applications in Facebook, when the F8 platform launched.

Facebook is apparently succeeding in NOT making money off of Facebooker selling via Facebook; Buy.com will pocket a 5% sales commission, though.

PLUS: Facebook Profile Hijacked: Beware the Dangerous OPEN Social Graph and Perfect Online Newspaper Storm: Digital Ads Explode, Pay Wall Implodes

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN

eBay vs. Craigslist? Who needs Google?

CEO Meg Whitman revealed eBay’s immediate plans for building out its new U.S. classifieds play, Kijiji, and where it stands on its Google search advertising spend in her report to Wall Street yesterday.

Bottom line? Kijiji is NOT just another Craigslist and Google is NOT the only traffic acquisition game in town, so believes eBay.

Whitman on Kijiji and Craigslist:

On the last day of the quarter, we launched Kijiji here in the U.S. to buyers and sellers in 220 cities in all 50 states. We believe our success with Kijiji outside of the U.S. is a great indicator of what can be achieved here and expands the buying and selling options we provide to people around the country.

We are interested in building a robust classifieds business in the United States. Because of our success internationally, we actually think it is the right platform on which to expand into the U.S. and serve classifieds communities in the U.S. with a new kind of offering.

Interestingly enough, we think actually that the U.S. market is large enough and diverse enough to support a number of different players in this area. This is a very fragmented market. Our plan is to use the U.S. classified business, it is really quite a differentiated offering versus craigslist, with a slightly different target market, and see what happens. If we have anywhere near the success we have had with Kijiji outside the United States, I think we will be quite pleased. We may learn some things that help the eBay U.S., but this is actually a classifieds play in the U.S.

We enjoy a good relationship with craigslist and we have been an admirer of their company for a long time. We don’t expect this launch to impact our investment in craigslist. We plan to maintain our minority equity stake.

With regard to investment in Kijiji, obviously we’ve made some investments in the site. But one of the great things about having a global platform is we can actually launch in 220 cities and 50 states at a relatively low cost using the investment that we have made in the Kijiji platform overseas. So it is one of those times when scale actually helps speed.

So we are going to largely grow that organically. We do a little Internet marketing, we do a little direct marketing, but particularly in 2007 and 2008, we want to see how fast we can grow this organically.

Whitman and CFO Bob Swan on Google:

Our growing advertising business, our partnerships with Yahoo! and Google are going well. We are bullish about the long-term potential of this monetization mechanism.

Our advertising business is starting to gain some significant momentum. Overall, advertising and other revenue was up 77% versus the prior year, increasing from 3.1% of total marketplaces revenue last quarter to 4.2% this quarter. This acceleration was driven primarily by the launch of advertising in our international eBay businesses. We’re pleased with the progress we’re making and believe that advertising complements our existing transaction-based platform, allowing us to capitalize on our significant traffic.

Late in the quarter we ran an experiment to see what would happen if we were to change our allocation of Internet marketing between our largest providers. We pulled back from Google, reallocated to AOL, Ask Jeeves and Yahoo! in particular. We learned a lot from this test that will actually drive our go-forward Internet marketing spend. It has to do with return on investment, where we can get the most leverage.

We have gone back to spending some money on Google. We will continue to reallocate not only between IM engines as we go forward on particular words, but also, frankly, we are reevaluating our spend between offline and online.

So a great test that we did. I think we learned a lot from it. I think we are going to be even more efficient than we have been in the past in terms of the efficacy of our IM spend. By the way, it had no impact at all on the results for the quarter, because the money we largely were spending on Google we moved to other partners and saw actually great ROI.

Long live coopetition? SEE: Google’s Big, Bad Risk: Coopetition

ALSO Read my exclusive interviews: Oodle CEO Q & A on eBay, Kijiji & Craigslist Classifieds and Craigslist Q & A: Classifieds Community NO ‘Walled Garden’

PLUS: TechCrunch: Hot, or Not, for Silicon Valley?

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN

Craigslist is NOT concerned that Web auction leader, and minority shareholder in Craigslist, eBay is flexing its $44 billion market cap muscle to muscle in on the online classifieds space, right in Craigslist’s own backyard.

Why not? Both Craigslist founder, Craig Newmark, and CEO, Jim Buckmaster, have long had a public stance of “bring on the competition,” because choice is good, for classifieds users.

When I asked Buckmaster last week if charges that Craigslist is a “walled garden” are justified, he underscored the Craigslist principle to not impede “competition”:

Walled garden” is a misnomer — this term arose to describe AOL’s attempts to keep their subscribers from accessing the internet at large — we do nothing of the sort, and in fact encourage users to go elsewhere.

WHAT IF Craigslist DID “worry about” what other companies are doing in the online classifieds space?

eBay is crystal clear in its intent. Spokesperson Hani Durzy:

This is going to be our classified ad play in the United States. We look at it as competition to Craigslist and other platforms. But we think there is room for competition.

Craigslist’s Buckmaster is also clear: “Many companies offer classifieds. We don’t think of them as competition, or as a challenge to Craigslist.” Perhaps more to the competitive point, Newmark has oft noted that efforts to “emulate” Craigslist are a regular occurence.

Will eBay Kijiji be the one to succeed in out Craigslisting Craigslist? NO. Here are ten reasons why:

DOMAIN NAME: Incomprehensible, hard to say, difficult to spell.

eBay GOODWILL: No connection for users of Kijiji.

eBay TRAFFIC: Not to be leveraged for Kijiji.

USER ACQUISIITON: Costly reliance on paid and “natural” redirection of search engine destination traffic.

CLASSIFIEDS MODEL: Undifferentiated implementation of Craigslist.

TIERED SERVICES: Will eventually be upsell driven.

ADVERTISING: Will eventually be advertising fueled.

MISSION: eBay shareholder profits.

SOUL: Corporate.

PHILOSOPHY: Kill the competiton, Craigslist included.

When Craig Newmark is asked about the classifieds efforts of others as “Craigslist killers,” he undersocres an inherent appeal of his namesake site is that it really is driven by a singular purpose to “give people a break.”

In other words, while it may be easy for a well financed corporation to physically build another Craigslist, a publicly traded $44 billion market cap business will be hard pressed to “emulate” a people come before profits core operating principle.

Right out of the U.S. Kijiji gate, in fact, eBay’s take no classifieds prisoners fiercly competitive stance is in stark contrast to Craigslist’s collegial welcome of eBay to the online classifieds world.

In its report “eBay starts U.S. version of its classifieds site,” the San Francisco Chronicle cites a dissatisfied user of Craigslist, Heather Castro.

Castro reports ”not getting much response” from her Craigslist ad, so she welcomes Kijiji. Who turned Castro on to the would be eBay Craigslist killer? An eBay accountant, her husband.

He mentioned it over dinner and I fgured why not. I wanted to get my message out there. Craigslist is a little bit busy, so I tried Kijiji and realized, wow, this is not busy at all…Once they get people using it, it will be a great way to network.

eBay is clearly getting ITS big classifieds business message out there. BUT if history predicts the future, non-eBay employee users of Craiglslist will not be swayed.

While Buckmaster oversees the daily operation of Craigslist, Newmark works on the user facing front. How committed is Newmark to serving users at Craigslist?  In New York City recently, Newmark shared that he is dedicated to serving as Craigslist “Customer Service Representative” forever, literally.

Craig’s stance on Craigslist? “The exit strategy is death.”

READ MY EXCLUSIVE CRAIGSLIST INTERVIEWS: Craigslist Q & A: Classifieds Community NO ‘Walled Garden’ and Craigslist’s Craig Newmark: ‘My life is a sitcom’

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN

eBay is back on Google, but in a “much more limited way than it was before.”

The great eBay who needs AdWords experiment showed that eBay does not need to buy as much advertising from Google as before to maintain its traffic, according to eBay. Hani Durzy says:

“Overall the takeaway for us was that we weren’t as dependent on AdWords as some out there may have thought.” Traffic tio the site was higher during the ten day ebay “experiment” and eBay sales don’t appear to have been dampened. “Other partnerss, Yahoo, AOL, MSN, really stepped up and provided a lot of value. And natural search continues to drive a lot of valuable traffic to the site.”

Random searches at Google do indeed illustrate that eBay has not returned in full AdWords force to Google.

On the Google front, eBay’s AdWords business is welcomed back, but Google is not budging on its agressive Google Checkout vs. eBay PayPal strategy.

SEE: Google eBay Smackdown: Round Two and Google: Matt Cutts Joins eBay PayPal Party

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN