Once upon a time, everyone paid for their listings, except on the odd occasion eBay ran a promotion for free auction listings when the start price was 99c. The people liked free listings and asked eBay for more, so eBay granted this wish but said to compensate, they were going to introduce third-party advertising on free listings and raise the FVF. The people were moderately happy.

After a while, the people decided that they needed more free listings. eBay once again said ok, your wish is my command, but in return we need to put third-party advertising on all listings, raise FVF again, and get rid of the sliding scale, which used to reduce the FVF percentage the more an item sold for, and charge a little bt more for the non-free listings. Three times as much, in fact.

The moral of the story is....stop asking for free stuff, it costs everyone more in the long run. 😉