Depop goes the weasel. My ecommerce first love eBay this week bought Depop for a cool $1.2B or 60% of their total ad revenue for 2025. Etsy got the haircut on the original purchase to the tune of $400M - Are Etsy right following their divestment schedule and cutting their cloth to measure?
And eBay why this? Why now? Myself Hendrik Laubscher were joined on a post Valentines Day nostalgic walk down Saly lake City Drive reminiscing of better days. Is history repeating itself? We have been critical of eBay over the years and it is a lack of identity we talk about, not performancel Indeed, under Jamie Iannone they are on a nice trajectory and Q4 did Q4 things for them. But growth is hard to come by, so bully for them.
Is this purchase a defensive move against Vinted or is this just a tiredd acquisition strategy. We got in on Whatnot and getting back to core among many other things. Watch this full episode of the Ostrich Report to see where we land see if you agree.
eBay internally said they wanted to crush amazon, externally they said they do not want to be Amazon. mission accomplished for the wrong reasons. But do ebay get a bad rap? Are they exactly what David Marcus talked about last week in his PayPal address? Should we celebrate middle of the road or are they quietly ambitious - PLacing bets every few years not afraid to offload when the pressure is high (unliek Drake Maye, maybe he is just too young).
Ostrich Report doing Ostrich report things - Sorry, Ben is hidden by the banner in the final version !! NNNooooooo
