Guess you remember in the times of the dot-com bubble , when b2c titans like e-bay and amazon, were supposed to kill traditional commerce and visionary people predicted they will own or be part of the majority of our daily shopping.
I used to spend a couple of hours a week in sites like eBay, Amazon or MercadoLibre trying to find interesting stuff, sharing content and reading comments. .. Did that last phrase sounded familiar to you?, that’s the same thing we still do, more days and hours a week in such sites as Facebook, mySpace, etc, etc?. Apparently, instead of spending money in things we barely need, now we spend more time (= less money) reading stuff, comments / tweets, pols, playing online, etc. This slow decay could be associated to several factors like international crisis, inefficient search, new competitors (mercadolibre (AR), craiglist, olx, and so…), among others, but at the end the Real and simple reason is that is not fun anymore.
Over the years we changed the way we use and have fun with internet, and fastest connections allow us to get more content, streamings, and realtime communications. Finally facts of our daily life and history became reflected and published.
This is a rank that describes the average user behaviour for US on 2004.
And this is for the year 2006
As a verification to my point I mashed up a couple of trends graphics, showing a comparison about searched terms in ecommerce and social. (source: google trends)
- Argentina
| ebay |
|
1.00 |
| mercado libre |
|
17.0 |
|
|
16.0 |
|
|
0 |
Here, in Argentina, Mercadolibre.com (local ebay and ex affiliated to them), was crushed by facebook before october 08.
- All regions
| ebay |
|
1.00 |
| mercado libre |
|
0.04 |
|
|
1.74 |
|
|
0.02 |
Same thing for all reagions 6 month before.
Leandro.
Sources: - Google Trends . http://www.google.com/trends - Tech Crunch . http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/23/how-facebook-myspace-and-youtube-killed-ebay/ (great article)
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