Whatever you want

Jun 19 2005 By Mike Kelly, The Sunday Sun

Want to buy a nuclear bunker, a pack of George W Bush "in drag" playing cards or a bottle of fresh Cumbrian air? The eBay will probably be your first port of call. The internet auction site celebrates its 10th anniversary this week, just days after being branded an electronic pimp by Bob Geldof. Mike Kelly, who very nearly bought an Armani jacket on it until gazumped at the last second, reports.

If charity gig organisers offer free tickets to punters you can bet your bottom dollar that within minutes of being snapped up they'll be up for grabs again on eBay . . . this time for cash.

It was the Sunday Sun that revealed in April that free tickets distributed for Radio 1's Big Weekend event in Sunderland, starring Natalie Imbruglia and Gwen Stefani, had turned up on eBay priced at #250.

The latest example is the Bob Geldof-inspired Live 8 concert to highlight world poverty.

To be staged in Hyde Park, London, next month, the line-up includes Coldplay, U2, Madonna and Paul McCartney. The 150,000 free tickets were distributed by means of a text lottery in which more than two million people took part.

Bob blew his stack when he discovered that scores of the tickets barely reached the winners before they were on sale again for as much as #1500.

The sellers were branded as "wretches", whilst eBay was labelled an "electronic pimp".

An embattled eBay spokesman, while offering a donation to Live 8, said: "We are allowing the tickets to be sold because we live in a free market where people can make up their own minds about what they would like to buy or sell." After more pressure, eBay later put a block on the selling of the tickets. The nub of the internet auction site is the fundamental basis of economics . . . the laws of supply and demand. eBay has taken it to a different level by creating a global shop.

I heard of a guy who, as a creditor of a bankrupted clothes shop, got a stack of nylon shirts in what was believed a token gesture towards paying the cash he was owed.

He put them up for sale on eBay and within hours sold the lot to a guy called Nylon Bob from Sydney, Australia.

Lindsay Marshall, a lecturer in the school of computer studies at Newcastle University, collects bifurcated rivet tins, forking out about #2 a go for them on eBay.

He says it's part of what makes the internet auction site so successful.

"I suppose in many ways it gives value to any old rubbish," he said.

It was launched on June 23, 1995, by software engineer Pierre Omidyar in San Jose in the US, part of California's Silicon Valley. It is claimed the inspiration behind it was a girlfriend who traded in Pez sweet dispensers.

According to Lindsay, this is an urban myth, but whatever the catalyst, the numbers for eBay are now mind-boggling.

It has 150 million registered users worldwide who buy and sell goods which are divided into more than 40,000 main and sub-categories worth around #22bn.

The site occasionally seems to encourage people to part company with their common sense, for example buying goods freely available on the high street for a vastly inflated rate.

"I know of a man who bought a car roof box on eBay, and when it arrived it was too big for his car," said Lindsay.

"Another guy, as a joke, bid for 500,000 Lego pieces and got them. Half a million red, white and yellow six-peg pieces."

And then there's the heady cocktail of gambling and competitiveness when it comes to bidding.

It is now part of the national psyche, and here to stay.

Getting back to the electronic-pimp jibe, Lindsay thinks Bob might have been a touch unfair.

"I don't have a big problem with what happened.

" These people won those tickets fair and square.

"Somebody's making some money. It's not a big scandal. It was people just doing business."