On my recent flight back from San Francisco I stumbled upon an interesting statistic: The top 5 websites in the US in 2005 (ranked by Internet traffic) according to Alexa were:

• 1. Yahoo.com
• 2. MSN.com
• 3. Google.com
• 4. eBay.com
• 5. Amazon.com

This resulted in an easy to manage world for every ecommerce company. You might not like the fact that you have to pay to access the audiences from each one of those top 5 players, but you effectively could buy them: Online advertising in the form of display and/or text ads on Yahoo, MSN and Google bought you traffic to your own webstore, listing your products on eBay and Amazons marketplace allowed you to sell your goods directly to their users. The world was easy to understand and manage: All you had to do, was to manage your marketing expenses in comparison to your conversion rate and gross margin.

Fast forward only three years and the world changed radically. Today the top 5 US-websites ranked by traffic are:

• 1. Yahoo.com
• 2. YouTube.com
• 3. Live.com
• 4. Google.com
• 5. MySpace.com
• (6. Facebook.com)

This new reality made life a lot harder. If you are selling goods or services on the Internet and you want to tap into the audiences of YouTube, Live.com, MySpace or Facebook you have a problem. Although these companies sell (in one form or another) online advertising, it is widely known that the effectiveness of these ads is problematic. Building Facebook apps or MySpace widgets is not a walk in the park - and there has yet to be one which actually proves the concept that you can create an ecommerce opportunity in one of those little applications. Todays most used applications are all in the arena of fun and communication.

Hard times for E-Tailers - at the same time an exciting opportunity for the ones who are willing (and able) to experiment.