eBay appoints Komli to sell banner ads on its Indian site

Online shopping portal eBay, which opened advertising on its Indian site in 2007, has now roped in Komli, an online advertising network, to sell banner advertising on its site. eBay will keep on using Google AdSense for text ads.

In the US, eBay has a tie-up with Yahoo to sell text and graphical ad inventory on its US site, eBay.com.

According to Akshay Garg, business head, Komli, “This is an exclusive arrangement for one year under which Komli will sell banner ad space on the eBay site. Ad space will be sold in two ways. Our team will represent eBay and approach advertisers directly for selling ads. Apart from this, Komli will also employ its ad network optimisation service called Pubmatic to serve ads on the eBay site.”

Pubmatic is a technology which automatically selects the highest paying ad among different online ad networks to which a publisher has subscribed, such as Google AdSense or Komli.

“Earlier, eBay was using the services of Interactive Avenues and Quasar for selling ads on its site, but now Komli will be a single point for selling banner ads on eBay,” confirms Amarjit Batra, head, global trade and ad sales, eBay India.

Apart from advertising, eBay also allows companies to sponsor a category of products or showcase their products by creating a microsite on the site. The eBay India site has a registered user base of around two million members and it receives 2.5 million unique visitors every month.

Komli had recently received $7 million of venture funding from Nexus India Capital, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Helion Ventures.