This is another one of those crazy stunts where if you’re the first to do it, you’re going to generate a lot of buzz around the world.
The guys name is Ian Usher and he plans to ’sell his life’ on eBay. Now, when I first read this on the newspaper reports, I though he was just looking for someone to share his life with, since he just recently divorced with his wife of 5 years (reading in between the lines, I gather he caught his wife cheating on him.. poor bugger). If you read his site, alife4sale.com, he is actually selling everything so that he can use the money for a bit a whole lot of globetrotting.
Up for auction is
- his house
- his car
- his Kawasaki
- his bycycle
- his jet ski
- his electronics (including home entertainment system, laptop, digital camera, etc, everything!)
- his job (well a two week trial stint with his employer anyway)
On face value, it’s stupid. The best way to get most value out of your auction is to split it into multiple auctions so that people can bid on just the things they like. By bundling everything together with his house, he has shut away thousands of potential bidders who may be able to afford his camera but not his $420,000 house! As stories of the internet age go though, traditional thinking is there to be tested. Since publicising this auction, he has appeared on TV shows in the US, Japan, Britain, and a host of radio shows aswell.
He’s probably made enough money from those appearances already but for the trained money makers eye, there’s more. If you poke around his website, he’s got amazon and adsense ads, and judging from the footer link - a deal with his hosting company. According to Alexa, the site has already spiked up to the top 100,000 most visited sites and backlinkwatch shows that it has more than 1000 link backs already. Turns out that this will prove to be a smart finance move for Ian.
Regardless of his money making motives, and the fact that he’s already made a killing, I’ll be keeping a close watch and come 24th June, I’ll definitely add his ebay auction to my watch list.
Update: Just read his post on his adsense earnings. How abysmal. I think he needs some serious help on monetising that amount of traffic from yours truly.
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