Responses to the Yahoo-eBay Alliance (YHOO, EBAY, GOOG)

Yahoo (YHOO) and eBay (EBAY) announced a significant advertising and payments alliance earlier today. Yahoo will have exclusive rights to serve ads on eBay sites, reaching eBay's 200 million users, and eBay's PayPal service will become the promoted Yahoo Wallet payment method. A joint-branded toolbar is another aspect of the deal. The partnership is broadly seen as a move (offensive or defensive?) against Google and Microsoft. eBay has shot up nearly 11% today in response, while Yahoo is up about 3.5%.

Note that JP Morgan Securities had a report (.pdf) out just two days ago predicting such a eBay-Yahoo alliance as the most likely deal of its kind among the big internet players.

Here are some of the more interesting responses from industry professionals -- we'll publish sell-side equity analyst responses in a separate post:

● John Battelle: 'It marks Yahoo's first major syndication win in years... It's tempting to say Google loses here, and while I am sure the company would love to have eBay's site amongst its syndicated partners (like AOL and Ask), I am not surprised in the least that Yahoo won this round. The market tends to balance itself, and this is a major proof point.'

● Garrett French, Search Engine Lowdown: 'eBay can monetize all their window shoppers a little more effectively this way... Google's been sniffing up eBay's tree with Wallet (still vapor after a year...) and Base, so for eBay to extend their strong wallet technologies to Yahoo we may see something significant in mobile payment emerge.'

● Rafat Ali, PaidContent.org: 'The tie-up is more substantial than say the Google-AOL tie up, because of the more complementary nature of Yahoo and eBay.'

● Marshall Kirkpatrick: 'I think this is liable to be seen as a less obtrusive partnership than some other search engine/other vendor deals... the point is that Yahoo's recent torrent of feature-add-by-acquisition offers a lot of creative potential for a partnership with a huge player like eBay/PayPal/Skype.'

● Barry Schwartz, SearchEngineWatch: 'It is important to note that this partnership is primarily to provide graphical ads and click-to-call ads and on a lesser standpoint to provide some search ads. The limited search ads are probably because eBay does not want to detract visitors from the eBay products and auctions, which is logical.'

● Greg Sterling: 'At its essence, this is more distribution for Yahoo! graphical ads, more non-Google traffic to eBay auctions and some very modest consumer traffic to Yahoo! search via the eBay toolbar. This is a bit of the old "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" However, the two companies are complementary and it should represent an incremental boost in revenues for both companies and should open the door for some interesting opportunities — I'm thinking the acceleration of presence/click to call/PPCall.'