EBay Took Craigslist Stake In Part To Block Google: exec

[engine]

EBay Took Craigslist Stake In Part To Block Google: exec [reuters.com]

An eBay Inc executive said on Thursday the auction company bought a stake in Craigslist partly to block rival web company Google Inc from acquiring the classified ads business."That was a consideration," said Garrett Price, who was eBay's principal deal maker in its $32 million agreement to acquire a 28.4 percent stake in Craigslist in 2004. He spoke under cross-examination in a trial taking place in Delaware.

Earlier in the week, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar said Craigslist's founder Craig Newmark seemed distressed by his dealings with an unnamed party that was in talks to buy a stake in Craigslist, but was "hostile to its mission."

[Hugene]

Yeah, not too sure about this. This is probably a BS statement from the eBay exec (sorry for the language). IMHO the main aim of the the Craigslist stake was to eventually acquire the whole site, they clearly say that in the article too.

Big corporations are good and needed (tens of thousands of employees to build Amazon or eBay, that's good jobs that are needed by the people) but haveing some small, independant and against the grain player is also good.

Congrats to Craigslist and I hope they remain independent, and huge while being small, for a long time.

[walkman]

32 million for 28% was a steal, google or no google. The site was valued at $1 billion a couple of years ago and profit is tens of millions a year.

[mack]

Its strange that in 2004 Ebay thought of Google as "the competition" yet still threw a large chunk of their online ad spend at Google.

Mack.

[signor_john]

Its strange that in 2004 Ebay thought of Google as "the competition" yet still threw a large chunk of their online ad spend at Google.

Maybe that was simply an attempt to weaken Google by diluting AdWords and AdSense with millions of CPC ads for "dead popes."

[walkman]

Or Google was their only option to get that much traffic and sales?

[smartwork]

profit is tens of millions a year

I've only used CL a little, but where exactly does their profit come from? What is their paid service?

[walkman]

Real estate listing, companies posting jobs etc

[ergophobe]

signor_john, I know you're joking, but really, honestly, I think all of the "buy dead popes" ads really did contribute to accelerating my paid listing blindness on Google. Of course, it mostly made me think that EBay was stupid.