Here is some interesting reading from Shawn Hogan an ex eBay affiliate who was running a very successful eBay referral business.  Here is his blog post and another article on Auction Bytes website.

But after reading Shawn’s blog post, the “eBay Black Budget” got my curiosity going.  In the years that Meg Whitman was CEO of eBay there were blogs and discussion groups that were said to have eBay Pumpers who discredited anyone’s negative postings about eBay. One such site is the Yahoo! eBay Finance discussion board. where eBay pumpers were especially vicious and would go as far as to stalk other posters and mimic their user id and post as if they were that person.

Here is an interesting snippet from that post.

eBay Live! – June 2006
The top affiliates get invited to an eBay affiliate conference that takes place during eBay Live! each year. The conference was in Las Vegas this year and eBay affiliate program managers (along with some other eBay executives) invited me to a “secret meeting/dinner” where I was the only non-eBay employee invited. We had dinner at Mix, a swanky restaurant at THE Hotel.

Who cares, about a private dinner, right? Normally yes, until you get into what the topic of discussion at this dinner was. This dinner meeting had two main topics… 1. How can I drive more traffic to eBay (always the topic with eBay) as well as something far more interesting.

The Black Budget
One topic that was discussed was eBay secret “black budget”. This was described as a large allotment of money that eBay was free to do what they wanted with, without it being reported on accounting sheets (and in turn shareholders). eBay wanted me to REALLY ramp up spamming the web with eBay ads. I told them I wasn’t interested at ALL and in fact still wanted to quit the program completely, not “ramp it up”. I explained to them that Google was pretty good to me as far as sending me traffic and that I had no interest in spamming Google search results. Then they offered to buy any hardware I wanted with their black budget and get it co-located offshore if I wanted so that no one could trace the spamming back to me or digitalpoint.com. I still told them I wasn’t interested.

Yeah, no. eBay asking me to engage in cyber-terrorism against Google… thanks, but no thanks. I’m not going down that road.

After I made it blatantly clear that I was not interested in “hurting Google” for any price the topic turned back to how I could drive more traffic to the affiliate program. I told them that I really didn’t think there was a way I could drive more traffic. They questioned me about any of the “gray area” stuff I experimented with in the previous summer and if there anything in there that could drive traffic. I told them that it was *possible* to add additional traffic, but the only traffic they could get from that would be non-compliant. Their response was, “As long as you don’t show up on compliance reports, it’s compliant as far as we are concerned.”

You can read the rest HERE. If that post is pulled i made a screen grab of it.

But it seems that this is just the icing on the cake of eBay’s dark side while it was being managed by Meg Whitman. Just be sure that you take all things into consideration before heading to the polls.

And please share this posting with your friends with our widget below this post.