AuctionBytes reports on Terapeak Michael Jackson research

AuctionBytes, an online publication that reports on ecommerce and eBay, yesterday published a terrific article titled “Terapeak Quantifies the Michael Jackson Effect on eBay”. Chock full of eye-popping sales figures taken before and after the performer’s death, the article does a great job illustrating the impact of Jackson’s death across the entire eBay platform.

It also reiterates a pattern we’ve been seeing for years — that global-scale events are almost always a sure bet to shift the market.

Today, as thousands gather in Los Angeles (as well as many other places around the world) to remember the King of Pop, we’ve played around with our most recent data set and found a few more remarkable figures. Consider the following:

• In the 10 days prior to Jackson’s death, there were a combined 2,365 eBay.com listings using “Michael” and “Jackson” as keywords; over the 10 days following, that number climbed to 104,283.
• Over the 10 days prior to Jackson’s death, the sell-through rate for similar eBay.com listings was 30.49%; over the 10 days following, that number rose to 58.56%
• Over the 10 days prior to Jackson’s death, the average price of similar eBay.com listings (filtering out several outlier listings of over $100K) was $22.70; over the 10 days following, that number rose to $29.95.

Those final average price figures are even more remarkable when you consider that, prior to Jackson’s death, expensive concert tickets would have been inflating that $22.70!

Finally, we’ll leave you with a couple Terapeak screen shots that we think are pretty telling. First, here’s the past 30 days’ eBay.com listings for “Michael Jackson”:

And here’s the top of Terapeak’s Hot 100 Music section (trust us, he’s got a whole bunch more on there):

Tags: auctionbytes, ebay, jackson, michael, michael jackson, terapeak

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 7th, 2009 at 2:13 pm and is filed under Hot Products/Trends, eBay/ecommerce News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.