eBay vs. Facebook: One Man’s Trash Was Another Man’s Treasure

eBay is in its 15 year anniversary and Facebook just announced it has over 1/2 billion members. It’s amazing to me when I think back on all the things that eBay did over its 15 year course. Pretty amazing how this site changed the face of ecommerce on the web. However, one of the things that it did in the last few years, I find really interesting. Since John Donahoe become the CEO, what’s most interesting about eBay is to compaire its growth to others. If you look to the last few years of eBay and the last few years of Facebook, you can see how one man’s trash became another man’s treasure.

Facebook is right now the number one site on the internet with over five hundred million users in social media. It’s getting more traffic now than Google, as a landing page, and just a few years ago it was not even on the radar. What made Facebook grow so fast? It was the community. What made eBay grow so fast in the 90’s? It was the community. The last eBay Live I attended was themed “the Power of Us All” which was recognizing the power of the community.

Yet recently, eBay and John Donahoe have decided that the community is no longer important for their platform and they even rolled out the founder of eBay to help them trashed it. eBay told their community to basically f*ck off, we are NOT going to keep things fair and balanced. I think John Donahoe refers to the eBay community principle, as a “sacred cow” in this video with Pierre. At one time Peirre valued and treasured that cow, but guess they missed the meaning of the word “sacred” and messed with the magic formula. The new eBay says nope, we got other things more important to us than our community. They trashed all of the tools that the community would use to communicate with each other. Bought Skype and then figured out that they did not want the community to talk to each other. They changed all the open chat forums and boards and locked them down tight. So tight, that the community could no freely interact with one another the way they did in the past.

Donahoe and crew even removed the ability to blog on their platform, discouraged the sharing of photos in ads. Now just a few years later and all

of these kind of things that eBay threw away basically became Facebook, now you see how community is so important to a business model. They are building a business model around the community the same way that eBay built its business model via a community. The community is the most important nucleon of any business.

I remember back in the late 80’s, early 90’s, one of my most favorite shows was a show called “Cheers” and they had a song, and in the theme

song it said “A place where everybody knows your name” and no matter how good or bad the economy was or how good or bad people’s lives were. They always communed at this little bar called Cheers. So, cheers never had an episode about it going out of business or having money problem, because they could always sell liquor to their community.

Community is probably one of the most important factors in business so get it, understand it and use it for your benefit in your business. Don’t trash your community; learn from the mistakes of companies like eBay and from the successes of companies like Facebook. Embrace your community!