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You're operating on really old information (as are many others). There are
many thousands of people who know about MPB. The idea that the MPB bidding
pool is made up primarily of members of this list has not been true for
quite a while. Less than 20% of its registered members belong to this list (as
far as I can tell). Sure, MPB had its genesis with this list and most of the
early members were MOPO people -- but we've been up and running for almost a
year now and advertising heavily on the internet, in print with MCW, at shows
with handouts and via email. We have members registered with MPB who have told
me that they have NEVER bought anything on eBay and never even go to eBay at
all. We have people bidding who are just starting out with movie posters, as
well as long-time collectors.
If you ran a search using those 3 words -- movie poster auctions
-- on search engines like Yahoo, MSN, Alta Vista, Ask Jeeves and any others
(expect stupid greedy Google), you've seen that MPB consistently places in the
top 5 results returned (among the non-paid results) -- usually MPB is
sitting right at the top of the search results list in the #1 or #2
position.
This idea that MPB has a tiny membership base and hardly anyone looking at
it hasn't been true since the first few months of operation. Naturally, the
traffic on the site depends on how many posters are listed for auction at MPB.
The more posters listed, the more people come to take a look. When
there are a lot of nice posters up for auction, we have hundreds of individual
visitors stopping by every day. Of course, most sellers have ignored all of
this development, even though I've been trying to point it out to people for
about a year now.
There's no question that if the more active eBay sellers with
lots of inventory were to list some quality posters regularly on MPB, with a
wide range of reasonable starting prices, that they would generate sales on
MPB --just as they do on eBay -- and attract even more people to look at and bid
on the site and help it to continue to grow. Particulary if they were to
advertise their MPB auctions to their private lists of past eBay customers.
And in my book, a sale is a sale, regardless of where it happens.
The idea that a sale on MPB is somehow "less" than a sale on eBay is
ludicrous.
-- JR
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