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Social network for collectibles Worthpoint betting that data is king
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There has been a lot of speculation about exactly what Worthpoint has in the works ever since the company began it's aggressive campaign of antiques and collectibles market data accumulation.
As an auction business reporter, pumping a Worthpoint executive for privileged information is a bit like trying to cajole a cookie jar confession out of a child. You know they've got the goods, they know it, but you may not get the full story until they're darn good 'n ready.
Come to think of it, that's par for the course with every executive who has a vested interest to protect, and as it should be.
If you were to ask what Worthpoint is up to you may get the answer, "accumulating data on collectibles".
If you were to ask how they are doing this, they may say "by forging bonds with auction houses, using collectibles information gathering tools like Terapeak, and other mass accumulators of pricing information.
If you were to ask them how they planned to distribute this knowledge and make it useful to the community, they may say, "with our Worthologists", through our video coverage and production of the marketplace and social networking.
And if you were to ask them how this is all monetized they'd might say, "well to begin with through WorthPoint classifieds and it's brokering program, and... And that would be just where the conversation would take a turn towards vested, veiled, secrecy.
Below is an excerpt from a front page article by Content Production Manager, Mary Brenneman.
If you think data is boring or just for geeks, think again. There’s power in data. If you like to shop for antiques and collectibles, like I do, data can be your new best friend— one that helps you save money.
Data—millions and millions of items of data—is what WorthPoint and Terapeak, a subsidiary of Advanced E-commerce Research Systems Inc., are offering WorthPoint members.
WorthPoint has signed a seven-year contract with Terapeak, the company that provides eBay users with trending data. That’s how savvy eBay sellers know how to price an item and smart buyers know what to pay for it.
Easy access in one place to the most prices
Under the new partnership, WorthPoint will be able to offer its members more historical prices than anyone in the world—more than 100 million historical prices by the end of 2009 and more than one billion items over the course of the contract.
Click here to read all of the article:
Here's a likely useful scenario for the above mentioned. Let's say your shopping one of my auctions, and you know that 1956 Topps baseball cards are a great item, but I have 2 tray lots of them, and you don't know which are the key players for that year or what they would sell for.
Since any investment of Baseball cards from this era would likely be at least somewhat significant, you'd want the best information you could get, as fast as you could get it. Worthpoint claims that they'll be able to provide this kind of knowledge.
This is just one of the many ways that Worthpoint makes itself useful to the online world of antiques & collectibles dealers. If you haven't given the site a look, don't you think it might be time to do just that?
Thanks for reading,
AW
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