Ebay will probably make up much of the free listings with the extra volume on back-end fees, assuming at least some of the incremental listings do sell.

In addition, this volume increase comes just before the end of the calendar quarter, which is a time that some public companies, and especially mutual funds, do some window dressing on their company's performance. Ebay can claim that their listing volume is bigger than ever at the close of the quarter with this spike in listings which continue thru June 30th, whether 3-day auctions or anything longer. (Perhaps I'm overly suspicious, as their stock has been doing pretty well lately.)

On a good note, it shows that the Ebay infrastructure can handle the extra load. A few years ago, the system would have crashed under the extra volume.