eBay Takes Inspiration From Amazon Strategy In Quest For Promoted Listings Ad Revenue Growth
As eBay faces growing pushback and adoption slowdown on Promoted Listings ads, a new job ad hints the company may be taking strategy cues from Amazon in effort to keep advertising revenue growing.
The ad for a Sr. Manager, Promoted Listings STO says eBay is looking for a "single threaded owner" to lead "holistic performance, including adoption, revenue growth, customer satisfaction, and competitive differentiation" for Promoted Listings.
If you've never heard the term Single Threaded Owner or Single Threaded Leader, it's a management style popularized by Amazon focused on having one person who is exclusively focused on and accountable for achieving business-critical results in a specific key performance area.
Amazon Web Services Enterprise Strategist and Executive In Residence, Tom Godden, explained the concept in a company blog post from 2021:
A single-threaded leader is a leader who is 100% dedicated and accountable to a specific product, such as your mobile application, customer account, or the search capability in your e-commerce store. The single-threaded leader is responsible for turning strategy into real results, and they are empowered to do so.
The best way to undercut a strategic initiative is to make it someone’s part-time job. Yet this seems to be the preferred way of working. The CIO declares the initiative to be critical, but no one is empowered to make it happen end to end. Everyone expects someone else to do it. This is where the single-threaded leader steps in.
While the concept may be popular with eBay's executive leadership team and shareholders, sellers will likely take little comfort in the idea that eBay is looking to management principles made popular by Amazon to inspire their roadmap for seller-paid advertising products.
The move comes as North American eBay sellers have been anxiously waiting for the next Promoted Listings advertising shoe to drop after massive money grab attribution updates hit UK, EU and Australia earlier this year.
The new model, rolled out in Germany in February and UK, Australia, France, Italy and Spain in June, significantly changes the way eBay charges General cost per sale ad fees, attributing any sale where any buyer clicked on the promoted version of an item - even if that isn't the buyer who ultimately ends up making the purchase!
Since those updates went into effect, sellers in the UK, EU, and Australia have reported raising costs with disappointing returns, showing there is no increased Return on Investment or value added for sellers - only a significant pay day for eBay.
Liz Morton
The company has been tight-lipped about possible expansion to the US and Canada, but stealth updates to Promoted Listings Ad policy pages in June and the recent removal of the stand alone eBay Ads blog site may be foreshadowing changes will be coming soon.
Liz Morton
Meanwhile, last year's updates which jacked up minimum ad rates for both General Dynamic and Priority cost per click ads with no announcement and suspicions that eBay may be using sketchy dark pattern design practices to increase ad revenue has slowly chipped away at seller trust.
Liz Morton
eBay has been increasingly hitting a wall with ad adoption on the main platform, with some categories already at 70%+ penetration and the Q1 2025 earnings presentation included a small but interesting change to how the company reports ad revenue, adding a new metric for "Off-Platform Ads."
The note at the bottom of that slide says:
In Q1'25 we began reporting off-platform ads revenue as part of total ads revenue. Prior periods have not been recast, and we are including the baseline in the chart above to illustrate total ads revenue and the associated growth rates for all periods."1P = First-party advertising revenue, including Promoted Listings products and first-party display advertisements;3P = Third-party advertising revenue;Off-Platform = Advertising revenue from eBay’s off-platform businesses
Many sellers would likely assume Off-Platform might refer to eBay's Offsite Ads program, but it's actually referring to eBay's trading card marketplace TCGPlayer and Q0010 in Japan - suggesting the company is looking to tap into their other business units to boost ad revenue.
Liz Morton
eBay showed 1st party ad revenue increasing again in Q2 2025, but it's difficult to say how much of that may be due to the new attribution model which launched in Germany in mid-Q1 rather than increasing seller adoption.
And when eBay reports Q3 earnings on October 29th, that number will likely go up again as well - though again, it will be difficult to determine how much of that will be due to the fact that the new attribution model was rolled out to the UK, Australia, Spain, France, and Italy at the tail end of Q2 to be fully in effect for Q3.
Sellers have been expecting the attribution shoe to drop for the US and Canada in time for peak Q4 shopping season, which could still happen, but if eBay holds off until after the holidays it could indicate they are concerned with the pushback they've already received in other markets and don't want to risk killing the golden ad revenue goose in North America.
If eBay doesn't put out some very impressive ad revenue numbers for Q3, it could call their entire Promoted Listings strategy into question, which may be why they are proactively recruiting for a "single threaded owner" to bring new ideas to the table - but Amazon may not be the best role model, especially with increasing regulatory scrutiny on their ad pricing practices.
James R. Hood
