Failure pays.
Witness the wild bidding for FuckedCompany on eBay Monday morning, which, when last we checked, stood at exactly $10 million.
"I was bored this morning so I thought I'd put FuckedCompany.com up for sale on eBay. Bidding starts at $1," wrote Philip J. Kaplan, the New York Web designer who created the site, to the FuckedCompany mailing list Monday.
Apparently, there's huge demand for failure. In a mere 10 minutes just before 10 a.m. Monday, bidding rose from $1.6 million to more than $6 million for the site that catalogs rumors of failed, thwarted and generally screwed sites.
The "description" of the item for sale quotes the fawning press and industry hype that it's received since launch a few months ago, in amusingly deadpan fashion: "John Dvorak at Forbes said 'It's becoming the site du jour in Silicon Valley.' It's currently the 'hot Web site' in Rolling Stone's annual 'hot issue.'"
Not to mention the delectable audience the site draws: "The message board is a prospering community of active 'dot-commers.' The site's regulars are journalists, venture capitalists, recruiters, programmers, designers, Internet entrepreneurs, and pretty much everyone else involved in the Internet industry."
It also mentions the prestige that it has brought it's creator: "... The site's founder is a regular at high-profile speaking engagements including this year's Fall Internet World and NYNMA's Super CyberSuds conference."
What better way for a Net wannabe to buy into the buzz than to gobble up the only site that everyone, absolutely everyone in the industry reads for fear they'll show up on it and to gloat over their peers who do: the dot-com deadpool.
Let's just hope that eBay doesn't declare the auction a fraud and take it down before we find out how much our collective schadenfreude is really worth.
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