I already explained that.

Tell people up front how many bids we need to sell before the auction can start.

That way if they want the auction to start soon they need to cause bids to be sold faster.

If they don't mind waiting a few weeks for the uaction to start, they can keep the site secret so that it takes forever to sell enough bids to enable us to start the auction.

Want that iPad soon? Tell everyone you know about the site.

Not in a hurry to bid on an iPad? Keep the site secret so we never sell enough bids to buy an iPad thus never start an auction auctioning an iPad.

Simple.

You can still entice using things they need. Ashop has a wishlist, you can look at the wishlists to see what people wish we would auction, and announce that if we sell enough bids we will auction one.

You claim the method of auction is lucrative.

If so once we have auctioned one iPad we should have profits from that enough to buy two or dozens more.

If not, again, the thing is not even paying for itself so should be abandoned as sorry the founders were not afterall the awesome marketers they imagined themselves to be, their mailing lists were not large enough or responsive enough to bring in enough traffic to sustain such a site, maybe they should build their mailing lists a few more years until they do have enough hundreds of thousands or millions of people on their mailing lists to be able to drive enough traffic to sustain such a site.

Why are you so determined to have your mom's iPad bought for you by us? What is this drive you have to get us to buy you one?

It seems suspicious, as if you already figured out the "tell only your friends family and cronies about it so you can scam us out of shitloads of gadgets" scam.

If the damn thing is so damn lucrative it damn well should be able to pay its own way.

If not then sorry you were totally ignorant of how lucrative those things are, it is not afterall the latest and greatest how to get rich on the internet website type afterall.

Such sites are probably extremely expensive to market because no one has any incentive, normally, to tell anyone about them as more users means more competitors in auctions which means higher priced goods. So maybe you should start figuring out how your television ads are going to attract more users than qibid's television ads...

Or, tell people item X will not be auctioned until Y number of bids have been sold, so that if they want the auction to ever start at all they'd better tell all their friends and family to come and buy bids.

Maybe even tell them some clever stragegies, such as picking an item they do NOT want to bid on, and advertising the upcoming auction of THAT item on forums etc where people who are into THAT kind of stuff hang out, so that floods of people will come to buy bids for the "white elephant" causing enough bids to be sold for the iPad you want to finally come up for auction. (As well as the "white elephant", of course, but you don't care about that, you just want elephant lovers to come buy bids so your iPad auction will start...)

NOTE: REMEMBER too that the VAST MAJORITY of users of such sites basically get ripped off. So expect to need constant NEW floods of users as you probably will find you lose users at a massive massive rate. Also most people who ever used any such site also mostly got ripped off so expect that maybe a vast majority of them already know better than to use such a site. So you will probably need to spend far far more on television ads than you ever spend on things to auction.

-MarkM-