eBay and Craig's List Will Merge in 2005 to Create a P2P Media Giant

UPDATE - This post is speculative, not actual reporting.

What does a 21st Century media company look like? What should it embody and who, if anyone (or maybe that’s everyone), will run it? These are certainly good questions and they are being discussed this week by sages like NYU Journalism Chair Jay Rosen, the Online Journalism Review's Mark Glaser and others on Rosen’s influential PressThink weblog. The question comes down in my mind to what is a sustainable media business model. While Rosen points to a couple of stealth projects that will try hard to create a profitable business around hyper-local citizen journalism when they launch next year, I believe they will face massive competition from a successful company that's already right under our noses - eBay.

eBay and Craig's List are already the leaders in facilitating person-to-person commerce. They have also been steadily growing closer together - in August eBay acquired a 25% stake in Craig's List. In 2005 they will take this to the next level when eBay acquires the rest of Craig's List it doesn't own and then enables customers to blog right on their unified site. This will usher in a new era where citizen journalism is directly funded by person-to-person commerce. eBay community bloggers will be able to earn revenues either from their own auction listings or from classified sponsors who choose to advertise on their eBay weblog. In short, eBay will empower consumers to establish a micro version of the media business model that has been around for generations, but only accessible to the big boys.

The two companies have already eaten away at one of the core underpinnings of big media - the classified advertising dollar. So it's not hard to imagine them getting closer, empowering their customers to blog and thus closing the advertising/commerce/content circle. Consider what Dan Gillmor said earlier this year at the O'Reilly Digital Democracy Forum ...

"The real threat to traditional journalism isn't blogging. It's eBay, the largest classified ads publisher."

Dan is right. We have been trained to categorize Internet companies into little discrete buckets. Yahoo is a portal. Google is a search site. eBay is an auction site. Amazon is an online retailer. That's all well and good, but I bet the the brilliant executives who run these innovative firms, however, are taking a much larger view of where the online medium is headed and they're watching blogs create trusted communities that can spur future revenues. You should too.

Comments

[Susan Mernit]

Steve--see my post from Nov. 30th--http://susanmernit.blogspot.com/2004/11/bloggers-vsjournalists-game-over.html. I wrote: After all, 5 years from now publishing is not going to look much like what we see today--Amazon and eBay will be publishing magalogs, 50% of so-called online newspapers will be written by non-staff people, most media will be distributed via RSS and onto mobiles, and comments will be considered as entertaining as posts.
So I completely agree, and we must be seperated at birth, at least on this topic.

[Peg]

Totally agree with you Steve. We've already had some low-level talks with Yahoo! folks and Ebay is listed in our bizplan as #2 on our wishlist of partners. We'd love to be Ebay's content arm on a local market level and feed people auction listings based upon their readership preferences the same way we'll feed them "display" ads.

What more traditional media have in spades that Ebay certainly has less of is casual browsing as opposed to search. We think we can bring them that, and without them having to invest heavily in content.

[Matt Fondel]

Well, I disagree somewhat.

Ebay bought an interest in Craigslist because it is “running scare” of successful “Craigslists” forming in other cities. I think Ebay’s logic is that an Ebay backed Craigslist will “raise the barrier-to-entry” for other “Wannabe Craig Newmarks” in other cities (and at least give Ebay some time to figure out how to "ride the local wave").

If Ebay is to accomplish what you suggest, I think Ebay will probably do it with several hundred/thousand “Craiglists”. I mean, come on. Isn’t it a tad insulting to suggest that all of the people in all of the cities on the planet are all too stupid to master creating a successful craigslist-type website for their localities?

[Sean]

In response to Matt's comments-

Matt, it's not that people are too stupid to run their own local craigslist clones; despite its simple appearance, craigslist is not a trivial site to manage and requires a good deal more time, effort, and skill than the average person possesses. But hey, it's certainly possible.

[jc]

I guess we have seen the outworkings of this one haven't we? Ebay still getting stronger and maintaining in their auctions. Ebay most watched auctions