eBay Ventures Invests In A1 Media Group For Korea-Japan Cross Border Ad Push On Qoo10 Marketplace
eBay's venture capital arm, eBay Ventures, has disclosed a significant investment in digital marketing firm A1 Media Group, hoping to leverage the company's technology in ad push to bolster Korea-Japan cross border trade for Qoo10 Marketplace.
The 700 million yen ($4.7 million USD) deal completed on July 11, 2025, aims to strengthen eBay's marketing infrastructure in the Japanese market by building a growing ecosystem of capabilities for small and medium-sized sellers who do not already have a marketing infrastructure.
A1 Media Group launched the multi-channel advertising platform "SingleOne" in 2024, allowing users to integrate and manage various advertising platforms, including Meta, TikTok, LINE, Google, and Criteo, on a single dashboard for efficient sales management and budget allocation.
And since March of last year, A1 Media Group has partnered with eBay's Japan operations at Qoo10 to provide access to SingleOne to over 500 Qoo10 sellers to date, with plans for expansion as part of this major investment.
eBay Japan will us SingleOne as a key advertising tool for sellers on Qoo10, providing a core solution to help solve problems that overseas companies in the early stages of entering the market face regarding advertising restrictions in Japan.
Head of Marketing at eBay Japan, Jaedon Kim said:
"This partnership is more than just a capital alliance; it is a core part of the co-creation ecosystem that the eBay Group envisions. We will work hard to support small and medium-sized businesses and startups with the digital tools they need to succeed in Japan's rapidly evolving e-commerce market."
Henri Yanimaegi of eBay Ventures added:
"This investment in A1 Media Group is an example of eBay's high expectations for the cross-border marketplace between Korea and Japan. We plan to continue providing innovative solutions with world-class technology and capabilities to Qoo10 sellers."
The move comes as eBay recently added a new ad revenue metric in their quarterly financial reports looking to keep momentum going amidst category saturation and possible seller ad spend pullback on the main eBay site due to the introduction of a new attribution model by pushing more ads on subsidiaries TCGPlayer and Qoo10.
Liz Morton
eBay's recent 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, however the reference to "off-platform businesses" doesn't exactly fit that definition.
Now ex-CFO Steve Priest provided more detail on the earnings call about what this new metric will actually be measuring, saying it represents advertising revenue from the company's other businesses outside of the main eBay platform, such as trading card subsidiary TCGPlayer and their Qoo10 marketplace in Japan.
In Q1, we included ad revenue generated by off-platform marketplaces like Qoo10 and TCGPlayer in our total reported advertising revenue for the first time. We've included details on the prior year baseline for comparability.
And on the Q2 2025 earnings call, eBay showed that Off-Platform advertising revenue grew 16% year over year and while the presentation slide doesn't give an exact dollar figure, we can extrapolate that it was about ~$19 Million (482-455-8).
There's an old business adage that says "you can't manage what you don't measure" and while Off-Platform ads are still a very small amount of revenue, the fact that eBay has started including this data for "comparability" likely means they expect to show "meaningful revenue growth" on that chart in coming quarters - with some help from their A1 Media Group investment.
