Word: months
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Omidyar wrote some code and over Labor Day weekend of 1995 launched what he called AuctionWeb, which was supported on the $30-a-month Internet service provider he was hooked up to from home. (The site's domain name was www.ebay.com and eBay was the name that stuck.) There were no Pez dispensers--that came later--but there were listings for a whole lot of computer hardware. eBay started out free, but it quickly attracted so much traffic that Omidyar's Internet service upped his monthly bill to $250. Now that it was costing him real money, Omidyar decided...
...payments that arrived with Omidyar's daily mail were small--in some cases dimes and nickels taped to index cards. But those little payments were coming in piles. eBay took in $1,000 the first month, more than it cost to run. Omidyar really knew he was onto something when he put up a listing for a broken $30 laser pointer that he was about to throw out. He fully disclosed that it didn't work--even with new batteries--and started it at $1. Inexplicably, a bidding war ensued, and someone ended up taking it off his hands...
...Elvis snow globes, anyone?), and a scary number of Beanie Babies. But there's also luxe (usually a few Rolls-Royces are going at any given moment). Poke around and you'll come across the impressively old (dinosaur teeth!), the bizarrely new (who really needs to bid on last month's TV Guide?) and the just plain weird (anyone for a metal BEWARE OF ATTACK RATS sign?). And you will find thriving subcultures that collect things you didn't know anyone bothered to collect. Really, people: antique waffle irons...
eBay is also one of the Internet's greatest financial success stories. It has defied the 11th Commandment: Internet Start-Ups Shall Bleed Red Ink. It's made money from its first month of operation. After only four years, eBay is worth some $20 billion--more than Sears and J.C. Penney combined--and its stock price has surged 25-fold. The rewards for the key players have been lavish. Whitman, after less than two years at the company, controls shares worth about $1 billion. Skoll's net worth is more than $3 billion. Omidyar's 30% ownership adds...
...became the place to be. But the real genius of eBay is its success in building a community--"maybe the most real community on the entire Web," says Whitman. There's no question people like hanging out in eBayland. The site gets more than 1.5 billion page visits a month. And at a time when the Internet mantra is "stickiness"--how long users stay on a website--eBay is cyberspace superglue. Each visitor to Amazon.com spends an average of 13 min. a month on the site. On eBay, each visitor's monthly average is about...