shorebreak - 9:47 pm on Oct 8, 2008 (gmt 0)

Like Google, Amazon and ALL the survivors and thrivers of the 2001 bubble, eBay grew by what tends to get called viral, but was actually plain old fashioned word-of-mouth.

Again, people who worked at eBay 2000-2004 and were directly involved in their paid search marketing campaigns have told me that >40% of all ACRUs came from paid search during that period, so I don't think it's correct to say they grew virally.

Moreover, I worked at RealNames and know first-hand just how much of their traffic was coming from paid search.

Sounds like we both beg to differ, but I did want to make the point that most people first got to know eBay from constantly seeing their brand in paid search listings on all the major search engines at the time.