When I first started at eBay I was surprised at how a company of thousands of people can have so few bloggers amongst its mists. But giving credit where its due, Adam Trachtenberg has been at it since 2002 so Adam is old school even on general blogosphere standards. Of course having fewer bloggers is not a bad thing . . . eBay is not the type of place where people with huge egos can last very long, we generally lack people with the usual “personalities” that people associate with celebrity bloggers (read egomaniacs). (Hmm. . . what does that say about me ?) Anyways, today at work I discovered a newly launched eBay blog by Jason Steinhorn and had to share some of his insights on Google Payments. . . (and give him a little bit of PageRank magic . . . not that I have any )

Speaking of payments strategy, another thought crossed my mind this morning. A number of online advertisers have been pushing towards that ultimate online advertising offer — Pay Per Transaction. Essentially, instead of having the merchants pay for each click-through from a Google ad to their site, they only pay for those clicks that ultimately result in a paid transaction. The difficulty with implementing this type of system is ensuring accurate tracking and reporting of transaction data (how does the merchant and advertiser track and audit click-throughs leading to purchases?). But, owning both ends of the transaction — lead-generate and payments — makes implementing pay-per-transaction quite feasible.

In fact, as a friend pointed out, Google Payments might have been a direct result of needing a back-end audit trail for pay-per-transaction data.

So here it is, as the world tries to catch up with Google, Google is trying to catch up with eBay . eBay is the largest PPA (pay per action) network in the world with the highest monetization ratio than any other PPx model. I’m not being smug, just welcoming Google to the party . . . we are not standing still either.