March 02, 2007

Bebo Ebay - Some Data to Add Context

This week's announcement that Bebo would allow members to list eBay auction items on their profile pages caught some attention. I wanted to share some stats to provide context to the deal and to illustrate the potential power of the partnership. First, I'll talk about how much traffic is currently moving between the sites and then second I'll show the impact that the deal with Skype had on Skype's traffic to provide insight into the power these partnerships can have.

1. Traffic moving between eBay and Bebo
Last week, Bebo was the #14 upstream site (site visited immediately before eBay UK), accounting for 1.02% of eBay UK's upstream visits. This represents an almost 7 fold increase in the share of visits that eBay receives from Bebo year on year and a 75% increase in the past 6 months. eBay ranked #7 among downstream websites from Bebo and Bebo sent 2.05% of its downstream traffic (site visited immediately after Bebo) to eBay.

The following chart shows the percentage of eBay UK's upstream visits that have been coming from Bebo each week for the past year. The chart illustrates that the increase in visits from Bebo to eBay UK is about on pace with the increase in visits to Bebo.

2. Impact of Bebo deal with Skype on Skype Traffic
Until early February 2006, the amount of Bebo's own traffic going to Skype's website hovered around 0%. Last week, (week to 24th February 2007) Bebo accounted for 69.41% of UK visits to Skype.com. The partnership has been incredibly powerful for Skype.

The following chart shows the proportion of Bebo's own traffic that it sends to Skype.com and to eBay UK. As you can see, as the Skype widget spread through Bebo, the amount of Bebo's own traffic that it sent to Skype increased, through June, and it has remained fairly steady (with some fluctuations) ever since. The proportion of Bebo's traffic that it sends to eBay UK has remained flat throughout that time. (Just to clarify, Bebo accounts for a much larger share of eBay's upstream traffic, but when considered as a percentage of downstream from Bebo, the picture is different - and there it has remained flat).

eBay is a larger site than Bebo and so we are unlikely to see the same dramatic impact on eBay traffic that we have seen on Skype's website traffic. Last week, eBay was the #2 most visited website in the UK, compared to Bebo at #9, and eBay attracted a two and a half times larger share of visits compared with Bebo last week.

However, we are likely to see some impact. I don't think we'll see eBay UK overtake Google UK any time soon(Google UK currently attracts a nearly 3 times larger share of UK visits than eBay UK) but we are likely to see eBay's visits grow. Also, we may start to see eBay's demographics shift, in particular to attract a larger proportion of visits from Scotland, Northern Ireland and families with children, demographic groups that over-index with Bebo relative to eBay UK.

Posted by Heather Hopkins at 02:38 PM
Posted to Social Networking

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