The cat was out of the bag, and with the full resources of Alibaba at its disposal Taobao was now free to take on eBay. Yet Jack wanted Taobao to maintain an innovative, start-up culture, something aided by a preemptive move by eBay to try to sew up the market. eBay signed exclusive advertising contracts to promote its site on all the major China Internet portals, preventing them from displaying ads promoting rival sites. This forced Alibaba to adopt a series of guerrilla marketing techniques, including reaching out to hundreds of small but fast-growing sites and online communities that eBay
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