Promoted listings in their various forms are simply different "advertising" mechanisms. Ever since the early ebay days of the early 2000s there were ebay promotional ways to get your items in front of more buyers, different names, styles etc, although some of them have been "introduced" more than once in the last 25 years, another sign of being old. Note that the same problem holds true on the "non-ebay" online sites I sell on as well. There are millions of items out there, the selling venue (newspapers of old or ebays of today) are always going to be providing options for folks to boost their readership/viewers, and generally the more its boosted, the more it costs - the "classifieds" to Full page ad spectrum of the old print days, only electronically now.
Prior to the internet, for me (also in the stamps world) it was VERY expensive and time consuming to try to gather customers from the UK or Australia etc. I can remember spending hours trying to come up with different wording variations for overseas advertisements, I could only afford classifieds. On the home front, even to get in front of folks in the US was relatively prohibitive expense wise, and local to Canada, again to move up from classifieds was an expensive, risky time consuming thing to do. Same as happens now, I had to decide how and where and how "big" I advertised. It is worth noting in the words of an old timer, the "cost" to get an item in front of someone anywhere in the world is astonishingly low compared to what it was pre-internet (a 20% ad cost against domestic sales was usual, 10% was phenomenal, international 20% was phenomenal - noting that "ad cost" in today's world includes ebay store cost, promoted fees etc).
Based on my selling style, a chunk of the ebay promoted styles/variations do not make economical sense for what they deliver, for what/how I sell. As before I have to figure out where best to spend promoted (advertising) funds, if at all.
This latest iteration is somewhat surprising as it doesn't intuitively link to a reason "why", although I suspect behind the scenes, at least in my narrow view, views on an item seem to lately more significantly increase its organic viewership, so I suspect it's meant to capture "organic" sales of a promoted item spurred on by increased promoted views. (PS I'm NOT ebay cheering here, simply speculating on a reason why behind the scenes)
Really though, while it might help to know why, as always is the case I'll have to see what my overall "advertising" rate change is in the new year, and I'll adjust as necessary.
When they made the change that once someone purchases something promoted everything else they purchase that is promoted within 30 days gets dinged too (whether the view was organic or not) forced me to review my promoted approach (ALL my items were promoted at least the minimum amount at that time) and I reduced the amount of items I was promoting.
I'll do the same here, I suspect it isn't going to increase the overall cost I'm incurring much, of course if it does, I'll adjust how I spend my "advertising" dollars appropriately.
It would be so nice if things would just stay the same but the online world evolves, so we as independant "business folks" have to decide how to evolve too.
