EBay Sells Scandal Wares

When I was a kid, my stepfather tried to get me involved in stamp collecting. I didn't get it at first. It seemed rather boring; tearing off used stamps that had been licked on by other people. Over time, I developed a real value for stamps, seeing them roll in and out of circulation, but this, only after discarding my collection. Every boy collects something. Some collect baseball cards and others model cars. But every boy collects something. That zeal for collecting has created a new market for eBay as sellers have forged into new territory by auctioning off items with an attachment to either a celebrity or a scandal involving a celebrity.

American's have always had an appetite for celebrity and stardom. The goings on in Hollywood leads the evening news on a nightly basis as opposed to the war in Iraq or the upcoming presidential election. We are consumed with the lives of people like Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie, stars like Anna Nicole Smith and Robert Downey, Jr. How they live and how they have died draws more of an audience than any other news story on television today. With such an attraction it should not be surprising that eBay has seen an increase in the number of items auctioned off with scandal attached it.

After the death of fashion designer Gianni Versace, Kimore Lee Simmons purchased priceless antiques like his bed, Versace's dining room set, and another prized possession, his toilet. Far be it from me to understand why someone would find value in someone else's toilet, but in a world like the one we live in, anything is possible. So when you look on eBay's site and you see that an auctioneer is currently receiving bids for the suit worn by OJ Simpson on the day the verdict was announced we should not be surprised. The fact that the seller has a minimum of $35,000 is surprising, but who are we to assess the value of something?

When OJ Simpson was speeding down that California highway in that white Ford Bronco, his life was turning upside down. By the time the trial was over, you knew Johnny Cochran was fabulous and Mark Fuhrman was a racist. Do you remember the trial of the century? If you are like most Americans, you followed the OJ Simpson trial from beginning to end, as Orenthal James Simpson was acquitted with Johnny Cochran at his side of killing his wife, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. Do you remember the last moments of the trial? There OJ Simpson is standing before Judge Ito with Cochran by his side when he hears the verdict being read. Not guilty of all charges. While the world has moved on from that day, OJ Simpson and the suit he was wearing that day have not.

To this day, OJ Simpson has been trying to outrun the scandal that is, his alleged murdering of his wife and Ronald Goldman. At the same time, a seller on eBay is capitalizing on that one moment, by auctioning off the suit that OJ was wearing that day. Sound strange? Strange would be a word attached to one of the fastest growing niches on the eBay marketplace. Beyond the sells of watches and computers, books and cars is a new segment made up entirely of pieces of history, celebrity history and scandal. Paris Hilton's boarding pass for her recent trip to Hawaii after being released from jail.

In the 90s the cliché was 'sex sells'. While that has not changed much, it now is accompanied by 'scandal too'. Millions of people were glued to their television screens in 1995 when OJ Simpson was riding shotgun beside his best friend, Al Cowlings, in the white Ford Bronco down the highways of Los Angeles. We watched as he sped up and down the coast until finally turning himself in. We watched as Marcia Clark and Charles Darden were outwitted by Johnny Cochran and Mark Shapiro. We watched as Mark Furman proved racist and evidence proved useless. We watched as Johnny lamented, 'if it doesn't fit, you must acquit'. While at the same time, wondering what happened, when he was. We watched it, because it was juicy. We knew OJ. We had watched him win the Heisman football trophy as the nation's best football player while at the University of Southern California. We watched him as the best running back in the NFL while with the Buffalo Bills. And then we watched him even more as a pitchman for Avis and a movie star in movies like the Naked Gun series. We knew OJ.

And because we know OJ, a smart businessman believes the market for the suit OJ Simpson was wearing that day in 1995 is valuable to somebody, somewhere. Therefore, on the eBay website, you will find that suit being auctioned off with a minimum of $35,000. Is it strange? Possibly, but so is our appetite for scandals. From Paris Hilton to Michael Vick, scandals open every news show, star as the front page of every newspaper. They are the bread and butter of building an audience in media today. Shows, whose premise is based on information about stars, regularly outperform shows with an emphasis on the war in Iraq.

Is it worse that items like Simpson's suit and Paris Hilton's plane ticket are for sell or that there are people actually bidding on them? What about a whiskey flask alleged to belong to Al Qaeda leader, Osama Bin Laden? Unimaginable? It's on there. That is the power of eBay, the world's largest marketplace for independent sellers. Since its launch in 1995, eBay has over 241 million registered users and averages almost two thousand dollars worth of goods traded every second.

EBay has emerged as an opportunity for people that did not exist before the Internet. Collectors were the only agency for such goods before eBay arrived on the scene. Nowadays, everyone is a collector. Besides, scandal sells.