Trade Me thriving nine years on

KENT BLECHYNDEN/The Dominion Post

HERE'S TO THE FUTURE: Staff celebrate Trade Me's ninth birthday. There are now 107 people employed on the auction site.

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What began with one man's Internet search for a heater now has 1.9 million Trade Me members regularly searching for bargains.

The auction Internet site celebrates its ninth birthday this week, with no signs of its popularity slowing.

Trade Me spokesman Mike O'Donnell said the "informal but serious" tone of the company was a main reason for its success.

"People regard Trade Me as an overnight success but they forget that we did the hard yards for a long time.

"The trick is, you find out what consumers want, then you just do it. The focus is always first on the user experience."

Nearly half a million people now use the site each day - the record for hits in one day is more than 49.5 million page views. Page views average one billion a month.

Trade Me now hosts nearly 4.5 million auctions a month and has 1.9 million registered users.

Trade Me has snowballed from modest beginnings, with only seven employees in the first year of operation, to a staff of 107 now. It was created by Wellington man Sam Morgan in 1999 when he could not find a heater online to warm his flat.

The first item sold on the site was a computer server, and Mr O'Donnell said since then there had been a fair number of auctions that had entertained staff - and the public.

"Someone tried to sell Australia - it was passed in, it didn't make the reserve."

Then there was the "last cigarette legally smoked inside an Auckland bar" that fetched $7475, the handbag that All Black Tana Umaga used to whack fellow All Black Chris Masoe, which sold for $22,000, and the auction offering the seabed and foreshore, which reached $780 million before it was pulled off the site because "it couldn't actually be sold".

Kiwi entertainer Jon Bridges listed a "hardly used apostrophe" for sale - it eventually went to Joe, of Whakatane, for $100.

In 2006, Trade Me was bought by Fairfax, publisher of The Dominion Post , for $700 million, of which Mr Morgan received more than $200 million.

He and other shareholders - including his father, economist Gareth Morgan, who received about $47 million in the sale of Trade Me - are also in line to receive as much as a further $50 million as a part of a continuing incentive for reaching sales targets.

Gareth Morgan decided to donate all of his $47 million to charity and in 2006 gave about $12 million to Kiwis doing "good work" overseas.

These days he is unsure of the total amount he has donated but said "quite a lot" of the money had gone to charities within New Zealand such as the Wellington City Mission, Big Brothers Big Sisters of Taranaki and Rotorua's School for Young Parents.

"It's a lot of fun, and there are people with wonderful hearts involved," Gareth Morgan said.

TRADE ME TODAY

More than 1 million: Listings on the site at any one time.

18 minutes: Average time spent on the site.

3,922,052: Number of people who visit the site each month.

453,710: Average number of people who visit each day.

Monday: Busiest day of the week.

9pm-10pm: Busiest hour of the day.

Source: Nielsen NetRatings February 2008

- © Fairfax NZ News