You know that site where you bid on and bought your vintage designer duds? That Thundercats lunchbox? Or those garish home accents your girlfriend has all over her apartment? It seems that they were purchased from a media company. At least according to Simon Dumenco at AdAge:

There's actually another company that does something very much like what eBay does -- and, curiously, nobody hesitates to think of it as a media company. Like eBay, Craigslist is all about maintaining a giant, searchable database of listings. It brings buyers and sellers together (it also, famously, brings other parties, like the oversexed and the lonely-hearted, together, but I digress). Of course, it does so, mostly, without extracting fees, because of the admirable sociopolitical sensibilities of its founder, Craig Newmark. Oddly, Newmark regularly gets slammed for single-handedly killing the newspaper classified-ad business, even though eBay, founded in 1995, is four years older (and vastly more profitable) than Craigslist.

True. And Dumenco goes on to say that, unlike Amazon, eBay doesn't worry much about warehousing inventory or dealing with shipping and handling. Bu this main point is that the site has lost focus, allowed its user interface to go to shit, and lagged behind on product-search functionality. Any readers our there who still have credit/debit cards and thirst of online auctions care to chime in on this? Is, in the end, eBay just a media company? And if so, what's wrong with that?