Tuesday, August 24, 2010

The latest variation on "Telebid" ...

... is upon us.

It's called "SwipeBids" - extraordinary candour, since the company running it does pretty much swipe your bids. There are also nice stagey "blogs" promoting the site - here's one. "Due to high levels of spam", comments are manually filtered - though I strongly suspect that although my comment was not spam, it won't be appearing in the comment list.

The model is pretty much exactly as spelt out here. It is not an auction - SwipeBids are fundamentally not interested in the money they get for the item they are using as a "prize" - they get far more from the accumulation of "paid-for" bids. This scheme is nothing like eBay.

By all means play their game if you're feeling lucky. If you know what you're about, it's a better bet than the lottery. However, bear in mind that the better you do out of their website, the more other people are being screwed. That's not a characteristic of a real auction.