The ticket-reseller market is going strong despite lower selling prices and new challenges from primary sellers, such as Ticketmaster’s paperless initiative, says StubHub.
Though the average price of a ticket on eBay-owned StubHub fell to $102 in 2008 from $112 in 2007, it began seeing gains in transaction volume and sales late in the year.
Ebay has a problem: It’s viewed as a quirky second-hand bazaar.
Oprah Winfrey may already be the Queen of All Media, but lately she’s been gunning for another title: Queen of All Tech.
Thursday’s episode of the show (taped earlier this month) is entirely dedicated to Skype, eBay’s soon-to-be-spun-off Internet communications service.
A little over a decade ago, archaeologists experienced a collective nightmare–the emergence of eBay, the Internet auction site that, among other things, lets people sell looted artifacts.
The strategies of companies ranging from Google to Microsoft and from Apple to Yahoo suggest they believe the future of the internet lies in mobile phones – but many in the industry believe the mobile web is still a long way from realising its potential.
In the past week, eBay Inc. chief executive John Donahoe has taken steps to divest two businesses, acquire another, and revamp his company’s core e-commerce website.
During a call with investors Thursday morning, Donahoe said he thinks an initial public offering for eBay’s Internet-phone unit Skype will best “maximize value,” but he would be open to an unsolicited offer from another company to buy it outright.
EBay this afternoon announced that it plans to spin off Skype via an initial public offering in the first half of 2010. The company said specific timing of the IPO will depend on market conditions. The announcement did not say whether eBay would maintain a stake in the company.
EBay unveiled some long-promised changes to its e-commerce site on Tuesday. Some of the most vocal eBay sellers are giving the changes tepid applause–but still complain eBay isn’t addressing a more fundamental problem for buyers with the fees it charges.
A quartet of private-equity firms have joined forces for a leveraged buyout of a global telecommunications firm with hundreds of millions of users.
And no, this isn’t a blog post from 2006.
EBay is on a mission to woo developers at the Web 2.0 Expo this week in San Francisco.
During a keynote speech Wednesday, eBay CTO Mark Carges told an audience filled with Internet start-ups that “nothing matters more than getting paid for the hard work that you do.” EBay knows a thing or two about making money, he said, before unveiling a new program to open up the company’s marketplace platform and PayPal services to outside developers.
EBay’s PayPal kicked off the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco Wednesday with a frightening presentation on the “arms race” between online fraudsters and online retailers and shoppers.
Online fraud is becoming so lucrative, said Katherine Hutchison, PayPal’s senior director of global risk management, that it has developed into an industry with specialized players that hire each other in areas such as harvesting credit card numbers and freight forwarding. “A single professional thief doesn’t have to have all of the skills needed to commit fraud,” she said.
Microsoft is about to face a test of whether it can finally put the brakes on its loss of market share in Web browsers.
The company is expected to release a final version of Internet Explorer 8 this week, a new Web browser that consists mostly of small improvements designed to make surfing the Internet more productive, rather than radical overhauls.
The fundamental debate over eBay boils down to this: The stock certainly looks cheap–trading at around eight times Street estimates for 2009 earnings. But the core business still appears to many to be fundamentally broken.
It was almost exactly a year ago, in mid-March 2008, that Yahoo laid out its once-secret three-year growth plan for the Street as part of its strategy to demonstrate that Microsoft’s takeover offer for the company was too low.
Here’s hoping that the soothsayers at eBay are a little more accurate that the ones at Yahoo.
At a time when most companies aren’t willing to offer guidance on the March quarter, eBay is laying out its vision for 2011.
And what it sees is a big opportunity for PayPal.
In connection with the company’s analyst meeting today, eBay said its growth will be driven by its two core businesses: PayPal and e-commerce. In something of a repositioning, the company says that PayPal “has become a second core business,” with an opportunity to become even bigger than eBay Marketplaces.
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