Ebay recently announced that they will be dropping the price of their APIs to zero. Alex Barnett writes:

According to News.com, up until today developers paid eBay between $1.25 to $2.90 per 1,000 items listed and an annual fee of $500.

This is now zero.

Why did they do this? From Business 2.0:

The thinking had been that the APIs are valuable, so why not charge for them. But it turns out that it is more valuable to eBay to increase the number of linkages into its marketplace.

Put another way, eBay doesn't need its content to be on its site; so long as they get a piece of the transaction, it doesn't matter where the transaction is processed. As a result, it is to their advantage to spread the auction data they have, as the more links there are to their auction data, the more likely a transaction will occur. And so the more likely they will make money.

Richard McManus from ZDNet essentially says the same thing:

This is a common sense move in the Web 2.0 world, because it no longer matters if users buy and sell on eBay's official website. As long as eBay gets a cut of the auction, the User Interface could be in Timbuktu for all they care.

More and more, companies need to find ways to make their information decentralized, so that they can profit even if the information is not on their site. A classic example of this is AdSense; Google takes their network of advertisers and makes that information portable so that content publishers across the web can display ads on their site.

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