I was talking earlier about how Ebay (among others) made a business of turning auctions, highly addictive play like events, into an even sexier activity. Yesterday I saw an add at the underground here in London of a website called Swoopo. They took the Ebay concept to another level.

It works like this: people put objects for auction for insanely low prices and the bids go up in 10p increases. But to make a bid you pay 50p and a piece of this money goes to the seller. The bidder buys tokens (50 bids, 100 bids) that will use in auctions. The auctions happen in short periods of time and if someone makes a bid inside the last 20 seconds of the deadline of an auction it gets a time extension. This mechanic tends to get lower prices and the seller will make extra money from the bidding. So, the more interesting an item is, more bidding it should generate.

So, an auction becomes, more than ever, a strategy game where timing and pacing is very important. The creators turned the activity in a bona fide game. I don’t know if it will work. But the concept is amazing.