And on television his ambitions seem higher still

To associate with a rival to dominate global market: this may be the lesson of the week agreement last between Google and eBay ("Les Echos" from August 29). For eBay, which had established a similar alliance in May with Yahoo!, it increase its advertising revenues, including internationally, where the number one world of auctions on the Web sentence to develop its online to paid hosting services. Now, eBay everywhere will have an exclusive provider with which it will share the revenues generated by these advertising content displayed automatically by the software of profiling of Google and Yahoo!. According to Merrill Lynch analyst Justin Post "these two agreements could generate additional advertising revenue for eBay next year $ 125 million, and many more the following year".

Beyond rivalry

Partners in this case, Google and eBay are yet not gifts. The search engine is not recently launched online, Checkout payment service, competition from eBay (Paypal and its 100 million customers) But the will to conquer new markets, particularly in Asia where the number of Internet users is growing very strongly, encouraged the two groups to exceed these rivalries. Google technology unmatched to customize advertising online and eBay brings its power in the electronic commerce (more than 200 million users worldwide). By combining their forces, both think power impose on local players less experienced technical and marketing plans, and much less rich.

One of the major ingredients of this planned expansion is innovation. For example, Google will test next year on eBay sites a service called "Click-to-call", which will allow the cautious user to use the Internet (VoIP) telephony to call the cybermarchand from its fixed telephone post. This service, virtually unreported outside the United States, seems well adapted to Internet users in countries where e-commerce does not yet quite inspire confidence. eBay will be able to more rapidly enhance the recent purchase of Skype (world leader in VoIP with 100 million users) for $ 2.6 billion. On Google, Douglas Anmuth, Lehman Brothers analyst, provides that the use of this technology will strengthen its position of leader of advertising online, at the expense of Yahoo! and Microsoft.

High ambitions

A further step in the goal that fixé firm led by Eric Schmidt to establish its position of strength in the advertising market. And not only in the Internet. Thus, Google has already started a practice in the United States to block important advertising space purchase in large magazines ("Car and Driver", "PC world", etc.), and resale in online auctions to its traditional customers-advertisers. And on television, his ambitions seem higher still. Recently, Eric Schmidt revealed to financial analysts that he was interested in the digital television decoders. "Install the cable industry, telephony and telephone in the viewer of the terminals that our computers will soon be able to recognize", he explained. Objective: use the same techniques as those today allowing Google to target an advertisement to a user in the world of digital television. "Google is creating the largest advertising platform in the world", summarises Paul Kagan, a renowned analyst of the world of media.