Reuters reports that eBay is launching a new ad system that will allow eBay sellers to run ads on other sites.
Michael van Swaaij, eBay's chief strategy officer, told a conference of software developers here on Saturday of plans to allow eBay's army of auctioneers to run contextual ads on other Web sites in exchange for a cut of the resulting eBay sales.
EBay's system differs from existing pay-per-click advertising systems offered by Google and rivals Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp. by linking only to eBay auctions rather than serving as a generic advertising network.
The world's largest e-commerce site said it plans to provide hundreds of thousands of eBay auctioneers with simple snippets of code they can embed on other Web sites that showcase items that are for sale on eBay's site.
A test of the program, dubbed eBay AdContext, is set to be introduced early next week, Swaaij said. What goods appear in any particular advertisement will be determined by the keywords on that Web page, a technique known as contextual advertising.
The advertising system sounds like competition for context ad services like Google's AdWords but it is a little different in that it focuses solely on eBay auctions. Yahoo and Microsoft also have contextual ad systems. Critics of these kinds of systems have complained that they are prone to click fraud. However, it sounds like eBay's system will be commission based instead of pay-per-click. A ClickZ article confirms this and says that eBay AdContext will be handled by Commission Junction, the company that runs eBay's affiliate program.
