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Penny auction advertising on MacRumors
- Thread starter FloatingBones
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They are lying. "Overstock" means someone built too many and has to try to get rid of them at a cheap price. Hasn't happened to Apple for ages. And when Apple has leftover devices after introducing something new, the old devices get sold as "refurbished" by Apple itself. (Just recently Apple sold a lot of refurbished iPad 1's at very good prices; I would have bought one if I didn't have one already).
They are also lying when they talk about "buying" and about "auctioning". The essence of "buying" is that a merchant offers goods for some price, and if I want it I pay that price and get the goods, and if I don't want it, I pay nothing and get nothing. The essence of "auctioning" is that the merchant offers the goods but not at a fixed price, anybody can bid, and the highest bidder pays the bid price and gets the good, while everybody else pays nothing and gets nothing.
Notice the combination "gets nothing and pays nothing". All these penny auction sites make their living from people who pay good money to bid and end up paying lots of money and getting _nothing_.
They're baaaaack!
Consumer reports finally weighed in on penny auctions with this article.
Quibids has contended that their "buy now" program means they are not a ripoff. They published a report from an independent auditor which found that they do indeed fulfill on auctions from winning bidders and users of their "buy now" program. That program allows losing bidders on an auction to purchase the item and to lower their purchase price by the amount of [paid] bids the bidder placed on that item. Unfortunately, the "buy now" prices are typically inflated -- much higher than the amazon.com price for an item. Also, I've never seen any of the penny auction sites that do "buy now" actually list the "buy now" price for items up front. I believe the program is a facade: I would guess that far less than 1/100 of 1% of bidders know that "buy now" even exists.
Consumer reports finally weighed in on penny auctions with this article.
Quibids has contended that their "buy now" program means they are not a ripoff. They published a report from an independent auditor which found that they do indeed fulfill on auctions from winning bidders and users of their "buy now" program. That program allows losing bidders on an auction to purchase the item and to lower their purchase price by the amount of [paid] bids the bidder placed on that item. Unfortunately, the "buy now" prices are typically inflated -- much higher than the amazon.com price for an item. Also, I've never seen any of the penny auction sites that do "buy now" actually list the "buy now" price for items up front. I believe the program is a facade: I would guess that far less than 1/100 of 1% of bidders know that "buy now" even exists.
Good read!
I was amused by the penny auction industry's excuse-making:
The [penny auction] websites reject the gambling label. The main reason, they argue, is that there's no element of chance, as there would be when you play a state lottery, for example. They also say that you control how often you bid and when to stop.
Of course there's an element of chance. QuiBids' own site says "you win by being the last to bid" and you don't know who else is bidding or even when the bidding will end.By their definition playing slot machines isn't gambling because you are allowed to stop whenever you want!
Still serving up ads today:
Agreed. Heaven forbid if there were two bidders in an auction who wished to have "no element of chance": they would continue to bid up the auction forever.
These are gambling sites. They only continue as long as the sites attract freshrubes participants.
Good read!
I was amused by the penny auction industry's excuse-making:
The [penny auction] websites reject the gambling label. The main reason, they argue, is that there's no element of chance, as there would be when you play a state lottery, for example. They also say that you control how often you bid and when to stop.Of course there's an element of chance. QuiBids' own site says "you win by being the last to bid" and you don't know who else is bidding or even when the bidding will end.
By their definition playing slot machines isn't gambling because you are allowed to stop whenever you want!
Agreed. Heaven forbid if there were two bidders in an auction who wished to have "no element of chance": they would continue to bid up the auction forever.
These are gambling sites. They only continue as long as the sites attract fresh
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I agree that penny auctions are simply scams, but honestly guys, just install AdBlock if it bothers you that much. No one's forcing you to click the ads and the sites themselves tell you exactly how they operate, so it's not like you're being tricked into anything.
Opening one of those sites is a very nice way to make profit, though, I must say. The iPad that went for $51.54 in the previous picture would have probably made the site $5,154 revenue!
Opening one of those sites is a very nice way to make profit, though, I must say. The iPad that went for $51.54 in the previous picture would have probably made the site $5,154 revenue!
Ad-blocking software in general has already been discussed in this thread. I do not mind viewing ads here for a couple of reasons:
- Pertinent hi-quality context-sensitive ads are actually educational.
- Advertisements are the primary source of revenue for the site. Users that don't contribute to the site who block their ads are a drain on the site.
Opening one of those sites is a very nice way to make profit, though, I must say. The iPad that went for $51.54 in the previous picture would have probably made the site $5,154 revenue!
It's not quite that simple:
- Most of the sites charge $0.60 per bid.
- Many sites have other ways to buy bids. As kooky as it sounds, many sites conduct auctions that sell 50 or 100 bids. Some sites have auctions where 10 or 20 bids are packaged with items (like small-ticket gift cards).
- Most auctions on a site are for small-ticket items, and many of those auctions may well lose money for the auction site.
- If you watch on pennyauctionwatch.com, you'll see that there is fairly rapid churn of these companies. It's expensive to make these sites, and they have pretty high overhead to get new customers. I'm guessing there's a very high churn on customers.
New QuiBids ad
After over three years of a QuiBids-free ads, I got one this morning on the MR homepage:
The target of the advertisement:
https://www.quibids.com/en/landing/...gsc_nfml.gif&gclid=CIaV69Oa88ICFYdcMgodIj8AzQ
Please nuke. Thanks.
After over three years of a QuiBids-free ads, I got one this morning on the MR homepage:
The target of the advertisement:
https://www.quibids.com/en/landing/...gsc_nfml.gif&gclid=CIaV69Oa88ICFYdcMgodIj8AzQ
Please nuke. Thanks.