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I made $100K from a dick joke

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Re: I made $100K from a dick joke

#61

Post by hnlmorg »

alexey-salmin wrote: post #52
lotsofpulp wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

eBay is interesting. It has consistently high profit margins, but no upward movement in revenue or profit, which peaked over a decade ago, and its returns heavily lag SP500. I’m guessing investors don’t see much opportunity for growth in the online auction business to make it worth dumping a bunch of money just to take market share from eBay.

> online auction business Do they even do it nowadays? I was under impression it turned into an ordinary marketplace, probably with a bit more focus towards small/private sellers.

Yeah of course they do. And it’s still used by people looking to get deals.

Re: I made $100K from a dick joke

#62

Post by ndriscoll »

bloggie wrote: post #33
probably_wrong wrote: post #21

I don't have a great opinion of marketing in general and therefore I'm often unconvinced with arguments like "marketing is about fulfilling a customer's needs" or "adding efficiency to the market". Therefore I feel vindicated when a moderately-upvoted post says the quiet part out loud, namely, "Yeah, we made a fake post and just lied to everyone on the internet. I'm not sorry, because not only was it popular - it bec…

While I understand your perspective, I don't follow the vindication. Viral marketing is a marketing strategy, it is taught in marketing classes. Isn't it naive to believe everything you see on the internet?

Teaching young people to be dishonest in a school setting doesn't somehow make it legitimate. It makes those classes bad. Science classes aren't telling their students that they could advance their career a lot faster and with less work if they just make up data for their experiments. They acknowledge it happens, condemn it, and tell students they'll be failed or expelled for doing it.

Re: I made $100K from a dick joke

#63

Post by datadrivenangel »

gcr wrote: post #53
probably_wrong wrote: post #21

I don't have a great opinion of marketing in general and therefore I'm often unconvinced with arguments like "marketing is about fulfilling a customer's needs" or "adding efficiency to the market". Therefore I feel vindicated when a moderately-upvoted post says the quiet part out loud, namely, "Yeah, we made a fake post and just lied to everyone on the internet. I'm not sorry, because not only was it popular - it bec…

It looks like the author was eventually able to fulfill the orders in the end. What does the “lying” refer to?

I believe they made a fake post about someone documenting their experience getting mailed the bag of candies.

Re: I made $100K from a dick joke

#64

Post by segmondy »

kgilpin wrote: post #39
anonu wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cant believe ebay hasnt been disrupted yet...

In my kids’ generation (college aged) they all use Facebook Marketplace.

ebay is still useful for obscure stuff. if you want to buy used servers, GPU, electronics, car parts, etc. I don't think ebay and FB MP really overlapped, MP ate craigslist. The closest thing to eating ebay is Aliexpress.

Re: I made $100K from a dick joke

#65

Post by csh0 »

ninkendo wrote: post #36
oaththrowaway wrote: post #19

I sold a laptop on eBay once long, long ago. Someone did the "Buy it now" option but never paid. I'm trying to remember the exact situation (probably more than 10 years ago), but I had exchanged messages with him several times and he always had an excuse to not pay. Then I noticed he was selling the exact same model of laptop so it was easy for me to realize that he had just "bought" my laptop to remove the listing s…

I had the exact experience selling an iMac on eBay about 10 years ago. Buyer clicked buy it now, my listing was removed, they never paid. They deleted their account shortly after (it was some .ru email address.) eBay had nothing to say other than “try again after X weeks”. Why, so it can just happen again? They admitted they have zero protection against it. I deleted my account and sold it on Amazon instead. How anyo…

FWIW, eBay no longer works like this. When you put up a listing there’s now an option, enabled by default, to require payment at checkout.

This situation may still occur if you are taking offers on an item. In that case the buyer has to pay within 48 hours of the offer being accepted or the listing will become eligible for re-posting.

Re: I made $100K from a dick joke

#66

Post by giarc »

nickjj wrote: post #27

That reminds me of the toilet paper calculator during peak covid. He put up a site in about half an hour and it ended up getting coverage on TV which led to ~10 million visitors and it making $5,000 a day in ads for a while. The core logic of the app is 6 lines of JavaScript to take a few inputs and do basic math on them. I ended up chatting with the creator on how he built and hosted it back in 2020: https://running…

Thanks for sharing, just downloaded and will listen today.

Re: I made $100K from a dick joke

#68

Post by edanm »

probably_wrong wrote: post #21

I don't have a great opinion of marketing in general and therefore I'm often unconvinced with arguments like "marketing is about fulfilling a customer's needs" or "adding efficiency to the market". Therefore I feel vindicated when a moderately-upvoted post says the quiet part out loud, namely, "Yeah, we made a fake post and just lied to everyone on the internet. I'm not sorry, because not only was it popular - it bec…

> I don't have a great opinion of marketing in general and therefore I'm often unconvinced with arguments like "marketing is about fulfilling a customer's needs" or "adding efficiency to the market".

I mean, on some level, everything is marketing. People don't like marketing when it's fraudulent and morally suspect, which of course makes sense - I don't like tech when it's morally suspect, either!

But literally everything you know about, every product you use on any kind of basis, every service you use, every creator you follow, is something you know about because of some marketing, directly or indirectly.

And I'm certainly happy about a lot of new products/services/etc that I use, and think my life is richer for it.

Re: I made $100K from a dick joke

#69

Post by toast0 »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #37
anonu wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cant believe ebay hasnt been disrupted yet...

eBay is interesting. It has consistently high profit margins, but no upward movement in revenue or profit, which peaked over a decade ago, and its returns heavily lag SP500. I’m guessing investors don’t see much opportunity for growth in the online auction business to make it worth dumping a bunch of money just to take market share from eBay.

From my perspective, eBay has a solid niche of older items, and they tried to break into the buy new items market too, but the hassles of selling mean for the most part only scalpers sell new items on eBay. Although there's some niches where it's not unusual: new auto parts seem common, I guess it's easier for a dealer parts counter to run an eBay store than otherwise.

Re: I made $100K from a dick joke

#70

Post by woleium »

steveBK123 wrote: post #41
lotsofpulp wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

eBay is interesting. It has consistently high profit margins, but no upward movement in revenue or profit, which peaked over a decade ago, and its returns heavily lag SP500. I’m guessing investors don’t see much opportunity for growth in the online auction business to make it worth dumping a bunch of money just to take market share from eBay.

eBay I think had their growth capped once you had Etsy, Amazon FBA, and other options on the field. Your average normie has no interest in the hassle of selling their used stuff (which has, if anything, got harder in my 25ish years using eBay), nor of buying random used staff from anonymous individual sellers. Etsy covers the arts & crafts coded goods (though much is now China dropship). Amazon allows the big merchan…

Amazon fulfillment, That’s the killer. Why bother with another marketplace when vertically integrated Amazon does it all
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