Auctionata

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

~ the obituary ~

Running a live auction over the internet in 2013 was a harder engineering problem than it looks now. The video has to be low-latency enough that an online bid lands before the hammer falls, and the people watching the stream have to be in the same auction as the people physically in the room. A dropped frame at the wrong second is somebody losing a painting. Auctionata built a studio in Berlin and ran weekly sales anyway, in watches, wine, classic cars and old masters, starting in May 2013. German law helped: an auction under section 156 of the civil code is not a distance contract, so none of the usual consumer return rights applied, which is the kind of legal detail that decides whether a business like this exists at all.

Money was not the constraint. Alexander Zacke and Georg Untersalmberger founded the company in 2012 with investment from the Holtzbrinck publishing group and the Otto Group. A March 2013 round brought in 20.2 million dollars with Earlybird joining, and a 42 million euro Series C in March 2015 was led by MCI Management of Warsaw with the Hearst Corporation and Bernard Arnault also in. The company said it had more than three hundred experts in forty countries valuing items across more than a hundred categories. In the first half of 2015 it ran a hundred and twenty-three auctions with over thirty thousand bidders from more than a hundred and forty countries.

The staffing told a different story than the funding. Over three hundred people worked there in 2014, and roughly a hundred and thirty were let go in the first half of 2015, in the same months the company was reporting revenue growth of nearly two hundred percent. In May 2016 it merged with the New York online auction house Paddle8 and in December was renamed Auctionata Paddle8 AG, registered at the Charlottenburg court under HRB 155814 B.

What finished it was published on 17 April 2016 by Welt am Sonntag under the headline "Außer Kontrolle". A KPMG report commissioned by the company itself, covering 2013 and 2014, found that Auctionata and Alexander and Susanne Zacke had bid at the company's own auctions, which the German trade regulations expressly forbid, and that items worth more than half a million euros had been consigned by the founders, who had also taken substantial advances against them. The company replied that it had commissioned the report itself and that it covered only the startup phase, and said the matters had since been dealt with. Preliminary insolvency administration over the company's assets was ordered on 16 January 2017. On 28 February Auctionata announced it was closing, and in early March the WirtschaftsWoche reported that no investor had been found to continue it.

~ the case file ~

~ the studio ~

The thing Auctionata actually sold was presence. A traditional auction house makes its money from the room, from the auctioneer reading the crowd and the sense that the person two seats away wants this as badly as you do. Auctionata's claim was that a camera could carry that, and that a buyer in Singapore would feel the same pressure as a buyer sitting in Berlin.

By the numbers the first sale worked. The opening auction in December 2012 took 345,000 euros. The 2015 turnover figure that ended up in the record is 132 million euros, which sits oddly against the company's own half-year release claiming 35.7 million for the first six months, and the two were never reconciled in public.

~ what KPMG found ~

Bidding in your own sales goes straight at the thing the whole mechanism rests on. An auction works because every bid is a real stranger with real money, and that is the only reason the final price means anything. A house that bids on its own lots can set the floor wherever it likes and the online bidder, who cannot see the room and cannot read anybody's face, has no way at all to tell.

The irony is that this is the exact failure mode the live stream was supposed to fix. Auctionata's pitch was transparency through video, that you could watch the whole thing happen on camera. The KPMG findings covered 2013 and 2014, the two years when the stream was the company's main selling point.

~ the name afterwards ~

In May 2017 the website and the trademark went to Historia Auktionen, a Berlin partnership of Christian Gründel and Vincent ten Vergert. Paddle8 was separated out and continued on its own in New York, was sold to Native in 2018 and then to Facebank AG in 2019, and filed for bankruptcy in March 2020. Consignments stranded by the German collapse were sold off at Van Ham in Cologne.

auctionata.com and auctionata.de still answer. Both return about four hundred bytes with the company name in the title and nothing underneath it, which is the smallest a page can be while still insisting the brand exists.

A Berlin studio selling old masters to collectors across forty countries is a market with an entry price, and that price put it outside anything I would have had reason to open. My entire contact with Auctionata is retrospective and consists of two domains returning four hundred bytes each, plus a KPMG summary quoted in a German newspaper.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »