Ebay recently pulled its ads from Google Adwords in a move that was being sold to the press as an ‘experiment,’ but appeared more to be an act of retaliation against the almighty Google. eBay has now resumed its advertising with Google, but says it will not put as much weight with Google Adwords since the breakup.

The two competing companies, both relying on each other for revenue, appeared to be in quarrels last week as Google planned an event, named “Let Freedom Ring”, to steal the show from eBay’s annual user celebration in Boston.

Google’s event was being speculated as a protest against eBay, who does not offer Google Checkout as an option for payment on the #1 auction site. Google Checkout is similar to eBay’s Paypal, and such an addition to eBay would simply make it a monotonous blend of payment options that would certainly steal attention from Paypal.

eBay, one of Google Adwords top customers, then decided to remove advertising from Google, not shortly before Google stepped down and canceled the event.

For 10 days, eBay  resisted Google, buying advertising in rival corporations such as Yahoo, MSN, and Ask.

“Overall, the takeaway for us was that we weren’t as dependent on AdWords as some out there may have thought,” eBay spokesman, Hani Durzy said.

Be it not dependent, but there must be some dependencies as eBay has, as I would like to say, come crawling back to Google.

However, Durzy said the 10 day ‘experiment’ showed that the company was spending unnecessary amounts of money on Google Adwords, and would significantly reduce its advertising activity with Google as a result of.

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Entry was posted on Saturday, June 23rd, 2007 at 1:25 pm under Google.

Read more entries by George Gardner.
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