I couldn’t agree more!! They have lost touch with their roots…

Mark

I honestly think eBay have been experiencing an identity crisis for a long time. They had high traffic and high sales but they starting messing with things, not necessarily to their advantage as we can see from traffic trends.

I personally think they need to sort themselves out, they are an auction site, not an e-commerce site and should conduct themselves as such.

Ben

Totally agree with you. Hope I wasn’t negative. I as well make my living online.

I won’t take your remarks as negative – I hope they were not meant to be. I actually do make a living from the internet, and while my comment about G did have a dose of sarcasm, you really do have to examine and question G’s growth and expansion into nearly every internet aspect as well as the political arenas.

As Mark said, the other G would have stepped in long ago in any other marketplace.

Not surprisingly – the majority of the general web public have shifted from AOL > Google, when they think of the internet. Its funny you say that about your relatives… many of mine are the same way!

In one of the markets I am in with several same-niche sites, I have switched from ePN as a primary monetization to AdSense. The market itself is very unique and eBay is really one of the only places to buy the products.

The downside is that the sales process usually requires phone contact to make sure the orders are correct… this means alot of sales scavenging to outside the ePN system.

A steady month used to earn about $750-$1000/mo with ePN only. Now that I have removed half of the ePN ads and replaced them with adsense… monthly earnings have more than doubled overall, and ePN has only dropped by about 25% on a monthly basis.

Experiment… experiment… for sure!

M

“I guess G IS the internet now (?)”

Anybody that isn’t internet or computer savvy will tell u that G is the internet. Funny as heck to hear that, but people that live off of it as an income are befuddled by the fact that people think like that. I remember asking some relatives how they get internet service and they said they goto G.

@Mark,

This past week as a test I replaced a CJ ad placement with an Amazon widget to one of my sites. It has converted really good. I moved the adsense to the very bottom of the page. Results have been great. eBay earnings are the same, Adsense is the same, but now I am getting a little from Amazon. Don’t like the short cookie duration, but looks like people like to shop there – got sales 3 of the past 5 days.

Same thing happened to us… we got tired of being held to a different set of rules than buyers when it came to funds.

As far as G being “The” internet, you are 100% right! In any other form of business, our Govt would have stepped in long ago due to their control over the marketplace.

With the recent news about their new browser based Chrome OS, its about to get real bad.

@ Sean – I am roughly 40% entrenched in ePN, but nonetheless, its a fair amount of income tied into one avenue. The other 60% is spread across several networks, making ePN the prevalent force that it is.

Unfortunately I was one of those people who said “Oh it will never happen to me I’m not doing anything wrong”. Well it turns out you can be in the right, follow TOS to the letter, and they’ll still take and hold your money.

It’s so much easier to host your own store and work with a real merchant bank.

However for BANS, I still let my stores run for pocket change every month – and I’ve found the same, regardless of noindex / nofollow, robots G robots spider the pages anyhow. Doesn’t anyone else see this as being WRONG? I guess G IS the internet now (?)