Jon Quast

But if you look at eBay,

Its stock has gone up in recent years, in a big part because of all the capital it's returning to shareholders.

In fact, it returned more than $1 billion over what its profit was last year.

That's actually unsustainable.

It had $2 billion in profits, it returned $3 billion to shareholders.

Now you add on a $1.2 billion acquisition,

I think eBay is going to have less money to give back to shareholders here for the near future.

Etsy, on the other hand, gets this huge cash infusion.

I say it's the bigger winner.

Not necessarily on the consumer spending front, but how about on the business priority front?

If you rewind the clock five years, ad tech stocks were something that I was extremely bullish on.

I saw the whole thesis being that advertising was transitioning from linear advertising to programmatic.

That seemed to favor these pure play ad tech companies.

Really, they've struggled, most of them.

But you look at digital advertising as a whole, and it's absolutely red hot.

You just have to know where to look for it.

Look at Walmart's advertising business.

It grew 46% in its fiscal 2026.

Now, some of that was because it acquired Vizio.

But still, it's growing fast in its own right.