ComparisonEngines

From the press release:

Revenue for the Interactive Services segment grew 14.7 percent to $62.6 million. Segment profit was $12.8 million compared with $8.7 million during the same period a year earlier.
The growth at Interactive Services is attributable to increased user traffic and higher referral fee revenue at Shopzilla, and an increase in energy switching activity during the period in the United Kingdom for uSwitch.

This compares with Q2 revenue of $66.9 million and segment profit of $15.1 million (PDF link).

These results are a positive sign for the industry in the face of Shopping.com’s troubles as reported by eBay in its Q3 2008 call.

The results are also a bit of a surprise to me…if Shopping.com was really affected by “changes made by search engines that disrupted shopping’s traffic.” (from the eBay Q3 Earnings Call), why wasn’t Shopzilla?  Were these “changes” to PPC listings or organic listings?  I believe that eBay was probably talking about PPC (AdWords) listings.  I have to believe that most of the shopping engines were penalized by Google AdWords for littering product pages with AdSense listings.  Why not just build out your catalog, push merchant listings, and beef up other forms of advertising???

I’ve definitely noticed a lot less AdWords ads from the shopping engines on Google’s SERPs for products related searches.  No hard evidence, but  6 months ago, I remember seeing AdWords ads for NexTag/Calibex, Dealtime/Shopping.com, BizRate/Shopzilla.  Not so much anymore.

Organic listings are still dominated by the shopping engines.  I don’t think these listings are at risk in the short term as the product pages of the shopping engines clearly offer a lot of value to consumers, but if Google wants to push consumers to Google Shopping/Google Product Search/Google Base/Froogle/Google Checkout, as I suspect they do, the shopping engines better watch out.

Do I sound like a broken record?  Good!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 29th, 2008 at 6:27 pm and is filed under Comparison Engines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.