In radio ad wars, does eBay beat Google?

The march toward an auction marketplace continues with eBay's announcement that it has started to auction last-minute radio inventory in its Media Marketplace. (Sorry, folks, you have to be registered to play, so you can't just swing on over to eBay to see what radio is really selling for.) What we should all be watching for, obviously, is how eBay performs compared with Google, which has been in the market for awhile now with its January 2006 acquisition of dMarc Broadcasting, and other deals, such as its April agreement with Clear Channel to sell a small percentage of its inventory. Since auction-type models are supposed to be neat and clean, you'd like to think that the battle between Google and eBay will come down to who has the best model in the end. But I'm not sure this is how the battle for radio inventory will work out. About 15 months ago, I did a story on all of Google's aspirations to get into the ad business, and the response of radio buyers was what you could call NIMBY. There was simply no way that these people were going to let Google start sniffing around their turf and get involved in radio ad sales. Surely, things like the Clear Channel deal show that times are changing, but I'd still give eBay the upperhand here, just because it isn't Google, and ultimately people who often aren't to fond of Google will decide where the dollars go.