Death of EBay Auctions?

Looking at this report you could be forgiven for thinking John Donahoe had announced the closure of eBay as an auction venue recently. If he did then I missed it in among the fee hikes dressed as cuts, harsh financial controls placed on sellers dressed up as safety meansures and traps to minimise discount qualification dressed up as volume seller incentives.

Mr Donahoe certainly made it clear to me that he sees eBay preferring to have General Motors and powersellers importing an entire chinese factory's output each week as his future customers than Mom, Pop, me or Mr Stamp Collector.

The past week has seen some interesting traffic patterns which underline the massive uncertainty eBay users now face. At Pheebay we've found any news report containing 'eBay' in the title is likely to receive ten times as many hits as any other keyword. Then add the word 'strike' and you can triple the daily hit statistics again.

Tazbar have reported increased new user registrations. eBid have pointed to a doubling of site visitors and I've noticed a lot of rehashed eBay good news stories making it in to Google news again, even if they story reported is years old. Strange that.

I've been reading a variety of blogs and articles which - depending on the interests of the author - are either lamely pretending this is all good news for eBay users or, more often, wishing events on eBay and john Donahoe that would be unthinkable even in the most bizarre S&M establishments. There's also been the predictable flurry of anti-eBay videos appearing on YouTube.

I'm impressed by the amount of internet coverage the planned eBay strike has achieved in just a few days and, if this is any measure to go by, the 2008 stoppage looks to be a lot more threatening than the last episode of fee hike induced outrage in 2006.