Mooning eBay: After my earlier post regarding eBay’s fees and the obvious need they have for competition, one of my editorial colleagues at Hammock Publishing forwarded me a press release she’d received earlier today regarding an auction start-up that is using February 18, the date eBay is raising its fees, as their launch date.

According to the release, Lunar Bid, will not charge seller fees until May 18. “LunarBid plans to be the new source for millions of ‘homeless’ auctioneers who have abandoned eBay due to the fee increases.” LunarBid says it will not have monthly fee, and will have lower (than eBay) insertion and upgrade fees, with the final value fee never rising over 2% of the final auction value.

Despite Lunar Bid’s opportunistic timing and clever promotion, I believe a significant key to eBay’s success is its mass. I know how obscure the items I sell on eBay can be and am always amazed to learn that among its millions of users are a couple of buyers interested in what I have to sell. A phenomenon like eBay comes along only once in a blue moon. But still, I wish the Lunar Bid folks luck.

Prime numbers: WSJ Real Time columnists Tim Hanrahan and Jason Fry do the math on Amazon Prime and inspired me to calculate how much I would save by paying $79 a year to get “free” 2-day shipping. What I discovered by looking at a year’s worth of purchases (Amazon.com makes it easy to do this in the “Your Account” section), is that I have adapted my Amazon.com purchasing patterns to utilize the “super saving” free shipments on purchases over $25. I rarely pay for shipping. Because I purchase so much via Amazon, I figured it was a no-brainer for me to sign up. Well, I guess it would have been a no-brainer.

I have no doubt, however, that my colleague, Laura, made the right decision in signing up. It is unlikely anyone receives more Amazon.com packages.

Markets are conversations: Last month, eBay announced it was raising fees (yeah, right, like if you owned Boardwalk and Parkplace, you wouldn’t also raise fees). Lots of the company’s small business sellers said, “take this fee increase and shove it.” Surprise. In announcing some conciliatory fee cuts yesterday, William Cobb, president of eBay North America, said, “We’re listening to everything you have to say…..One of the great things about eBay is the candor and passion of our Community. Your input keeps this company focused on what’s right and important.”

Translation: “I’ve been hiding in a bunker for the past month.”

Don’t get me wrong. I love eBay. I sell lots of stuff on eBay. I buy lots of stuff on eBay. I have a 100% positive rating from nearly 50 different eBayers.

But I think eBay desperately needs competition.

Google has competition and feels the heat constantly. We all benefit.

Amazon has competition and feels the heat constantly. We all benefit.

Poised to host 75% of online auctions, eBay has what a long-ago client of mine used to call a “leveragable market share,” by which he meant, a market share that allows a company to quack and waddle like a monopoly while not actually being one.

Downside of a leverageable market share: You wait a month to say, “we screwed up” and then you try to explain things with this kind of corporate-speak: “Your input keeps this company focused on what’s right and important.”

Update: Wow. That didn’t take long. Within moments of posting this, I received a press release for Lunar Bid, an auction site that has announced it will launch on February 18, the day that eBay will raise its fees.

In the company’s press release, the start-up tweaks eBay for its “monopolistic muscle” and for instituting “a near 65% fee increase, while it already dominates 98% of the online auction market.” Don’t know where they got those stats, but hey, it’s like the 90s all over again.

Most e-mailed NYT article is 2 months old: While I don’t have the time to cite the specific posts, Doc Searls has often used the NY Times archives (and their cost-wall approach) to explore the value of what he refuses to call “content.” One aspect of their archives not subject to the costwall (just the registration requirement) are the reviews and articles appearing in the Sunday Books section. This means that for some reason I have missed, this two month old article regarding the best books of 2004 has hit today’s list of the “most e-mailed NYT stories.”

Nashville blogger meetup: Terry Heaton has information on his blog about an informal gathering of local bloggers Saturday morning at 8:30 a.m. at the studios of WKRN-TV. I think they are going to let us hack the teleprompters during the morning news so that whatever we type in, the anchor says. Other than that, there is no official program…just a chance to get together and perhaps talk a bit about the upcoming Bloggercon Nashville.

Custom publishing update: Other than not mentioning a custom publishing company I’m fond of, this DM News article about custom publishing is a good overview.