What about PayPal?

What about eBay owned PayPal? I'm suprised that there are no real competitors. Most of PayPal’s major competitors have shut down. According to Wikipedia:

• Citibank’s c2it service closed in late 2003
• Yahoo!'s PayDirect service closed in late 2004
• Western Union announced the December 2005 shut down of their BidPay service but subsequently sold it in 2006 to CyberSource Corporation
• BidPay announced it will cease all operations on December 31st, 2007

I've never heard of any of the companies that Wikipedia lists that offer services similar to PayPal - Wirecard, Moneybookers, 2Checkout, CCNow and Kagi.

In November 2007 Steve Case (AOL legend) opened Revolution Money. There was little fanfare. I was only able to find an article in the Washington Post and Information Week.

PayPal grew quick because they offered a free $5 to new account holders back in the day (1995) and an additional $5 to the person referring. Revolution Money just announced their own referral program - $25 for new accounts and $10 to the person referring. I recently wrote a post about this on my P2P lending blog:

PayPal competitor Revolution Money offers $25 sign up bonus

This means that Revolution Money is shelling out about $35 to aquire a new customer. Will this work for them? I signed up (hey, it's a free $25) but I can't see them getting $25 from me especially since almost all their services are free. I can only imagine they hope to sell to someone else that values each user at more than the cost of acquisition.

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