The second thing that’s impacting our vehicles business is just a shift in formats and how that volume gets monetized. Format shift is to more classifieds, more local and that’s why we have our [Mobilay] brand and Kijiji brand and other classified brands around the globe to capitalize on a shift in vehicles, how vehicles get transacted.
We also monetize differently. We monetize today more through subscriptions and ad-based fees as opposed to GMV based transaction fees.
James Mitchell (Goldman Sachs): Is it safe to assume that vehicles in Korea have very low take-rate activities which have less impact on transaction revenue, while the reduction in ASPs would flow through to lower transaction revenue because of lower final value?
Robert H. Swan: On your bifurcation of GMV deceleration in terms of how you broke it out, lower ASPs, vehicles and Korea, that is the right kind of numeric breakout. In terms of implications going forward, we expect the GMV from vehicles to continue to be relatively weak compared to prior period performance.
There are a couple of things in ASP that we laid out, it is more economy sensitive, and consumers migrating to lower-priced items within categories and we believe that is more economy sensitive and we will continue to feel the effects of that until the economy rebounds.
Christa Quarles (Thomas Weisel Partners): The only monetization happening is an ad from Yahoo!. Is that indicative of its ability to better monetize relative to what you think your listings can monetize?
John J. Donahoe: The bottom line is we think our listings, especially as we improve search, are the best way to monetize that above-the-fold real estate. So we do have the graphical display ad from Yahoo! at the top of the page but listings are still monetized most effectively and are consistent with the real core focus on the transaction marketplace.
We are finding where the text ads really monetize best are on null search results, where in those rare cases we do not have inventory, or on complementary items that are made to fold down at the bottom, and so overall both text ads and graphical advertising is growing.
We continually test that to make sure what placements optimize our advertising but by and large, above-the-fold listings monetize better.
|
More:
