In a recent article by Keith Rabois – a former Executive Vice president at PayPal who left the company soon after it was acquisitioned by eBay – Rabois attributes eBay’s current decline in visitors to the rise of social networking sites such as Myspace and Facebook, and UGC friendly entertainment sites such as Youtube.
While the correlation between these different websites may not seem clear at first, Rabois insists that eBay’s success was always predicated on its “fun factor”. He describes how prior to the rise of social networking sites, eBay had the unique ability to attract the general public by combining e-commerce with diversion – from the quirky fun of searching for hidden treasures to the thrill of winning them in bidding wars.
But with the increasing popularity of social networking sites, suddenly updating Facebook and Myspace pages or watching and responding to Youtube videos had surpassed eBay as a new way to pass the time. To win back the public, eBay decided instead to take on the characteristics of its more obvious competitors, Amazon and Google. According to Rabois, the result was that eBay “stripped whatever remaining fun existed out of its marketplace.”
The interesting take-away from this article is that eBay’s management was apparently oblivious to what made the website attractive to the public in the first place. While Rabois clearly has a bias in his writing (he goes on to lambast eBay for alienating the employees of Paypal, including himself, whom he describes as the “leading actors of the entertainment revolution”) I have to agree with his claim that eBay has lost much of its luster. I actually view eBay these days as more of a practical website; for example, the last time I went on eBay (almost a year ago) was to purchase an adapter for an outdated laptop. And it’s probably been at least 2-3 years since I visited eBay just for “fun”.
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