Reverse X-price auction - is this a viable business model?

Bidooba.se is closed.
Bidooba.se was a nice designed Swedish reverse x-price auction website. It worked approximately from January till July. Another well-known reverse x-price auction is Dubli.com, which is still in profit, but maybe because of combining 3 types of auction in one website - reverse x-price, zero-price and unique lowest bid auction.

If we compare 3 types of auctions in one table, then we maybe should make a conclusion, that reverse x-price auction is not viable online. Let us see:

	X-price	Unique lowest	Penny
Bidding	Paid	Paid	Paid
Current price	Unknown	You define	Known
End price	Market price	Very low	Very low

.

Development of UK market - tight battle

Interesting information was published in Redbread.co.uk page source. Redbread penny auction started 14 of August.
Here are the lines:

<meta name="publisher" content="Entertainment Shopping,
Inc" />
<meta name="copyright" content="Entertainment Shopping,
Inc." />

As we all know very well, Entertaiment Shopping AG is the owner of Swoopo. Swoopo has raised $10 million from August Capital this spring and previously raised $4 million from Wellington Partners.

If this is not a coincidence, then it seems, that part of this money is aimed at smoking out competitors - Madbid, Cookiebid and others.

How to fight against snipers (cheating software)

"Snipers" use automated "sniping" software to place bids for them.

By common opinion, the use of software, that bid automatically at the last second, is not fair at the penny auctions. This tactics smokes other bidders out and kills the game.

What to do?
First measure, what was invented by owners of penny auctions, was administrative - to limit the number of wins in week and month per customer.
Some auctions have tried to use Captcha, when customer press the bidding button (a challenge-response test to ensure that the response is not generated by a computer). 100% guarantee, but complicate manual bidding.

We are programming the tool for eliminating snipers now, our clients will be free of these players soon.

How much profit can generate penny auction?

The question we are asked quite frequently.

The answer is simple.
Suppose you have an auction with 10 active windows.
All 10 timers are updated every 60 seconds. One bid is one dollar.

Per hour you will earn $600. /Deduct the advertising costs, support and prizes - all of these costs you will adjust by yourself - and you will get your future earnings/.

Ad at GetAFreelancer.com

The ad was the following:

Description

I have a penny auction site and there are a few things that must be done so it works properly:
The auto-bidding is not working, something with the cronjob/curl-installation
The timer / countdown is not working, it just says 00:00:00
Gd library is installed but it's not possible to upload pictures
+ little small things
You must be well known how a penny auction / swoopo clone works!
The website is done with swoopo clone so if you have worked with it before it's good.
Many positive reviews
Please notice, this is a pretty small project since almost the whole website is done, so bid low.
Budget: $30-250

O-oh, the script doesn't work in full. The author paid $650 or $599 or $299 or $49 for the software and, of course, don't want to pay more than $250 for "relatively small" repair.
The best variant for him would be, if nobody will answer to his request. Otherwise he will сontinue to loose his money.

Casual Gaming in near future

According to CASUAL CONNECT Seattle 2009 Conference, the crisis has interesting effect on the Casual Games market. The market has grown, many companies have made great strides. In crisis times vendors become more actively to position their products as bringing happiness, a need in which for many has become even more relevant.

One of the reasons for the increase in gaming market is that the crisis is not so strongly affected the capacity to pay of ordinary users of online games. Now they refuse from major purchases (car, house), but continue to spend money on micropayments online. According to analysts, the average user spends for buying virtual goods and services up to $ 30 a month.