According to Overture

The keyword: ebay was searched for: 8,080,961 times during March 2003 on Overture’s and their partner’s search engines. There are rumors on the Net that Overture slightly inflates its numbers because Overture wants advertisers to bid on their search terms. Even if that number is not 100 percent accurate, it is probably a good estimate as to the number of times a particular keyword is searched for on all search engines.

Next I used Overture’s Maxbid Tool to see how much money advertisers are willing to pay, per click, through their ad for the keyword: ebay. There were many ads, with the top three putting in a bid of 37, 37 and 36 cents per click.

With prices as high as 37 cents a click, I concluded that the keyword ebay had too much competition to be profitable. The next step confirmed this. I went to www.google.com and typed in the keyword: ebay - see below:

There were several AdWords for the keyword ebay (A total of six ads at the time). As you can see from these ads, all are from affiliates. This is indicated by affiliate or .ffil or .ff. after the ad text and is underlined in red in my example above.

None of these Affiliates have their own website. They simply place AdWord Ads and put their Affiliate ID in the URL. When someone clicks on the ad, it sends them straight to eBay, where the affiliate’s ID is recorded on the server. When the user registers with eBay, the Affiliate receives $5 in commissions.

As indicated, the market is already saturated for the keyword ebay, thus the Cost Per Click (CPC) rate would be high. Therefore, I did not consider it profitable to create an ad for the keyword: ebay.