Auction Universe

» see auctionuniverse.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

In 1997 I was thirteen, on a 33.6k modem in Turkey, and the idea that strangers would post their belongings on a website and bid against each other for them was not something I had a use for or a credit card to reach. Auction Universe was a business built entirely for people in American cities who had a garage to clear out.

It was launched by the Times Mirror Company, the parent of the Los Angeles Times, and its homepage was in the archive by April 1997, which puts it in the water within months of eBay's own start. The site did the ordinary things: listings, bids, a members area, a program called BidSafe that it advertised as a guarantee for buyers who got burned. The pages were the blue-and-white of the era, laid out in tables, with a wordmark in the top left corner and a link to something called Coffee Talk.

Through 1998 it did the thing that made it worth remembering. Auction Universe started running local auction sites for a group of affiliated newspapers, one per city, each carrying the newspaper's own name and its own local listings but running on Auction Universe underneath. The logic held up well: it costs a lot to ship a used car or a dining table across a country, and newspapers had been quietly losing the cheap end of their classified business to the web for years. A local auction page was a way to get some of it back.

In November 1998 Classified Ventures agreed to buy the company. Classified Ventures was a Chicago consortium owned by American newspaper publishers, including Gannett, Knight Ridder, McClatchy, Tribune, the New York Times Company and the Washington Post Company, and it already ran Cars.com. It relaunched the site that December under a new name, Auctions.com, with a new logo and the tagline the real deal.

~ the case file ~

~ the newspaper play ~

The idea deserved better than it got. A newspaper's classified section had spent a century being the place where a town sold things to itself, and the local auction site was a direct translation of that into the web, using the one advantage the newspapers actually held, which was the town. eBay was national and shipping-shaped from the beginning, and it never really wanted the sofa.

What killed it was that the auction business does not reward being second. Buyers go where the listings are and sellers list where the buyers are, and once that spiral starts turning for one site it does not turn for anybody else. Being local was a real advantage in the categories where shipping is impossible and no advantage at all in the ninety percent of listings where it is not.

~ 187,000 against 12.5 million ~

There is a moment in June 1999 when eBay went down for a long stretch and the trade press noticed traffic bouncing to Amazon and to Auction Universe. That was as close as it got. A year later the numbers were finished: in July 2000, Auctions.com drew about 187,000 unique users while eBay was measured at 12.5 million.

Classified Ventures decided in August. The stated reason was that automotive and real estate were better markets to spend in than auctions, which was correct, and Cars.com went on to be worth a great deal of money. All auctions on the site were closed on 30 August 2000 and the site shut the following day. Members and the local newspaper partners were refunded what they had put in.

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