auctions Archive

If you are planning to make a bid for HeyAmigo, you have less than 24 hours left. The service is described as, "a service that matches advertisers with email newsletters, and vice versa". The auction is worth checking out as founder Ryan Carson has provided a lot of details on how the service works and the revenue model. The Carsonified team blogged the development process for HeyAmigo on their BareNakedApp blog.

From the auction regarding why they are selling, "We are a small team and we don’t have the man-power to have someone work full time as the product manager. Initially, we hoped we could run the app and maintain our current workload but we just got too busy and Amigo fell by the wayside. We still think it’s an amazing idea that, in the right hands, will make someone a lot of money. The idea of pay-per-click advertising in email still hasn’t been done yet and Amigo is a great start in that direction."

As of the time of this post, there have been no bidders so far. The current minimum price is $25,000 on the eBay auction. They are throwing in free shipping!

Also check out Carson’s "14 things I wish I knew before I built a web app" presentation from late 2006 — the tips still apply today.

We were the first American blog to report on the auction of the popular German blog Basic Thinking. I guess the reports of the auction being a linkbait stunt were false as the auction has run the full duration and a buyer came forward. 

Duncan Riley is reporting that the auction has closed and the final price was $62,000 (46,000 euros). Duncan notes regarding the buyer, "The buyer was identified as Serverloft, a German supplier of “professional root servers” with headquarters near Cologne, Germany. Serverloft CEO Thomas Strohe said in a statement that he had been long time reader of the blog, and that the company intends to continue the site in its current format".

It will be interesting to check-in on Basic Thinking in six months to see if the traffic and community remains. Selling a "personality blog" is difficult because if the personality leaves, many times the community leaves as well. A personality blog is one that has an author as the draw, not the community or content itself.

Update: I am hearing from my German sources that it was a smart move for Serverloft. They launched last September, had no real buzz and now for $62k they get access to the Basic Thinking audience and community.

Earlier today, ultra Twitter master Robert Scoble called Twply a spammer. Twply basically takes any "@" reply messages on Twitter and sends them to your email. It’s hard for me to call Twply a spammer because they ask each user if they want to send out a marketing message about their usage of Twply. Blogger Mathew Ingram says he selected the "no" option but the twitter message was still sent. I do believe that the language that Twply used on the marketing selection (sample screenshot below) was poor and could be considered confusing.

Update: Alex Hillman notes in the comments a similar situation to that of Mathew. I can assume either poor QA testing or just plain spammers. Either way, I’d change your Twitter password immediately if you used the service.

None of that matters now because the service went up for auction on Sitepoint earlier today. I can’t tell how many hours the auction ran for because Sitepoint doesn’t show a timezone on their posts. It looks like the auction was open for three hours. The auction was closed when a bidder used the buy-it-now option and purchased the service for $1,200.

From the auction:

Twply has been spread through twitter like nothing I have ever seen before, over 800 accounts added in one day. This site is being sold because our servers can not handle the load of the site, and the overwhelming traffic the site has been getting. Currently the site has sent over 8k emails.

I agree with Scoble when he says we will see more services pushing their marketing messages through their users to Twitter and other real-time messaging platforms. Will these messages be viewed as spam if the users select to run them? It’s up for debate.

In terms of timing, it seems Twply beat out JustHackIt by a few hours for fastest to launch and then go up for auction.

Online auction provider eBay has announced that they have acquired Bill Me Later for $820 million in cash plus approximately $125 million worth of outstanding options. The deal is expected to close by year-end.

eBay notes that today’s acquisition will be a good complement to PayPal. “Bill Me Later is a perfect complement to our portfolio; PayPal and Bill Me Later belong together,” said John Donahoe, eBay Inc.’s president and chief executive officer. “We now have a powerful combination of the two leading, complementary online payment products, each with proven benefits for consumers and online merchants. At an attractive valuation, our investment in Bill Me Later opens significant long-term growth opportunities."

Bill Me Later will run as a business unit of Paypal and Bill Me Later CEO Gary Marino will report to PayPal president Scott Thompson.

From the release: eBay anticipates that Bill Me Later will generate an estimated $150 million in revenue in 2009.

There is a conference call scheduled for 8:30AM and we will update this post with comments from the call.

Conference Call Notes:

John Donahoe says they want to focus this year on the following 3 things:

1. make ebay easier to use
2. improve product selection
3. improve paypal’s leadership both on and off ebay

We are reducing our workforce by 10% or by about 1,000 total workers. It will impact most parts of the company. We are creating efficiency while investing where needed.

John discusses the acquisitions of DBA from Denmark. He notes they own 25% of Craigslist. If you add up all of the sites that are in the eBay network, they have more traffic than Craigslist.

PayPal has a strong and growing penetration on eBay. Growth on eBay has led to growth off of eBay – one million merchants off eBay use PayPal. They focus on large merchants – 35 of the top 100 online merchants offer PayPal. 63 million consumers use Paypal. This quarter Paypal volume off ebay will be larger than on ebay.

BML (bill me later) and paypal belong together. we know the company and their unique capabilities – now is the right time to combine both companies. Bill me later is the number 2 online payments company. Bill Me Later brings 3 strengths to paypal:

1. a complementary merchant base to paypal
2. bml delivers a compelling consumer value proposal
3. bml helps paypal leverage its distinct business advantage – lower costs

We now have the #1 and #2 online payment brands. They believe that even with the market conditions, they believe this is the right time to bring the companies together.

Gary Marino, Bill Me Later CEO now speaking:

The more we spoke with paypal, the more we saw similar goals. He explains how bml works. They have a lot of risk models and can figure out if the sale should proceed in under 3 seconds. The appeal of BML is how easy to use – consumers like it apparently when they are in a rush.

BML typically sees double shopping cart size when using the BML checkout option.

They have re-engineered the credit model – they do not issue credit lines- they authorize sales one at a time.

Scott Thompson – Paypal President now speaking:

Bill Me Later is a lot like Paypal and that’s why it makes sense to come together. Discusses how BML has mostly larger merchants while PP has mostly ebay shoppers. Shoppers have more choice online now.

BML will help lower the overall transaction costs for Paypal. Paypal is available on 25% of all transactions on the internet.

Clearly their goal is to grab as much of the larger volume and transaction sites based on this call.

The acquisitions total 1.3 billion.

Stronger dollar has been a challenge for the company – more details on their earnings call next week.

Q&A:

• Bill Me Later will become part of PayPal. Gary is incented to stay. BML team is excited about the deal
• Expects BML to be on eBay by early 2009
• Paypal has 150 million accounts, 64 million are active
• valuation for bml less than half what it would have been a year ago
• biggest line item of cost for Paypal is transaction expense
• in 2009, bml and pp will interlink accounts with goal to have one signup process
• Skypte is 6% of total business

call has concluded.

Yesterday Techcrunch Editor Erick Schonfeld wrote a review of a new service called JustHackIt. Schonfeld called JustHackIt, "a dating site for hackers". Basically it’s a classifieds board for hackers and developers to easily post openings and have developers submit interest in those openings.

Less than 24 hours later, the JustHackIt service is now up for sale on Sitepoint. The current auction price is $20. In the 24 hours post launch the company reports the following stats:

• 18,258 pageviews
• 8,580 unique visitors
• Main traffic sources: TechCrunch, news.ycombinator.com, Reddit and Netvibes

The description notes the reason for the quick sale, "I launched JustHackIt.com last night. I’m really enjoying managing the site but didn’t expect the huge amount of traffic and don’t quite know how to manage a community site like this. I’m doing my best with it, but thought I’d post it on Sitepoint to see if someone is looking for this type of opportunity." They claim that they will have 600,000 pageviews this month – of course that doesn’t take into account that any blogger buzz dies off within a few days max.

Anyway, if you are interested in a cheap dat(ing) site for hackers and developers, JustHackIt is the one for you. And upon purchase you can tell VCs and friends, "I was on Techcrunch". Here’s their pageviews chart – note that this is by the hour not by the day, week, month or year.