With help from 007's Daniel Craig, “House of Cards” star Kevin Spacey and singer Adam Lambert, Alibaba makes China's Single Day larger than Black Friday.

In the annals of television history, China's “Tmall Double-11 Night Carnival” might go down as the watershed moment when 21st century retailing geniuses first truly fused online shopping and entertainment into one awe-inspiring juggernaut of consumerism.

More cynical types may see the star-studded, three-hour live broadcast — created by e-commerce behemoth Alibaba and featuring celebrities such as 007 actor Daniel Craig, “House of Cards” star Kevin Spacey and singer Adam Lambert — as the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it.

A combination of the Grammys, the Oscars, a game show, the Home Shopping Networkand Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve — all counting down to China's equivalent ofBlack Friday or Cyber Monday — the program was created by Alibaba to stoke interest in “Double 11,” a newfangled Chinese holiday also known as Singles Day.

The Nov. 11 event, which originated in the 1990s as a sort of anti-consumerist Valentine's Day for the singles set, has quickly become China's biggest shopping day of the year, thanks to a blitzkrieg of publicity efforts by Alibaba starting in 2009.

This year, Alibaba said total transaction volume on its Tmall.com platform alone hit $14.4 billion on Wednesday, far ahead of last year's record $9.3 billion. By comparison, U.S. retail store sales reached $9.1 billion on last year's Black Friday and about $53 billion for the entire Thanksgiving weekend, including online sales through Cyber Monday.

http://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fi-alibaba-china-double-11-singles-day-shopping-20151111-story.html

Advertising on Alibaba Marketplaces heats up

According to an article published by the WSJ this week, advertisers are jockeying for position on Alibaba properties; tbao and tmall where daily banner ads run as much as 180,000 yuan ($29,242).

From the various seller responses, it is not clear that future will include the same vibrant diverse marketplace as it does today, which was perhaps the primary driver that led to Alibaba's success.

The article paints a picture where Alibaba offers an auction environment, where sellers with the deepest pockets will outlast the smaller players that cannot keep pace with necessary spend to maintain ideal product placement on Alibaba properties.

But this is not a new story.  Sellers on Alibaba can draw from the experiences of eBay sellers, who at first prosper, yet as the relationship dynamic shifted in favor of eBay, sometimes find themselves increasingly at odds with eBay's policies.

Hence, if Alibaba continues this path, will it also face a similar path to growth as it's US counterparts eBay and Amazon, which depend on both volumes and community growth across both buyers and sellers?