Google gets married to Ebay who married Skype earlier this year !!

Well Google went one more step ahead on its conquest of the world wide web, it announced an agreement with Ebay that it will provide advertising for Ebay’s pages outside of the US. See press release on the Google site. In some sense this has to be considered a consolation prize as Yahoo continues to have the main chunk of Ebay’s business – the US business. On the other hand, in its ongoing land grab on the web, this must be considered another feather in the cap for Google – just more internet land for it to display its revenue generating ads.

On the other hand, it is not quite clear why Ebay likes this, other than the fact that it gives them a chance to play Google and Yahoo against one another and more importantly they obviously get a share of Google’s revenue. It must however certain to all the folks at Ebay that this move will not exactly be loved by their merchants – do they really want competing offers for “authentic antique red chinese vases” from Google (yes google has advertising for that – see here) for their own wares ? Probably not.

The Voice over Internet play

What makes even lesser sense to me is their play, on using each others voice over IP technology (yes, they both own it – google talk and skype) to provide another way for merchants (sellers) to reach out to buyers. It was puzzling enough to me why Ebay bought Skype in the first place. See Om Malik’s take on that story

I really don’t know what to make of the claim that Google and Ebay will either use Google talk or Skype for pay per call on Google’s ads which it displays on Ebay’s auction pages. This is after Google already passed on buying Skype. I am hazarding a guess that Google talk is about to either die an early death or is going to be seen in a Skyped up version soon, without having to pay the price for it ! It gets murkier … watch this space..