A first issue of Action Comics, Superman's debut, has become the world's most expensive comic selling at ComicConnect for $2.16m (£1.4m).  It started at just $1 and overtook the record for the same comic from March last year which clocked in at $1.5m at slightly worse condition.  There is lots of background on this comic that you can read on Nicolas Cage's Superman Comic Nets Record $2.1 Million at Auction.

Comics is one of the next markets The Martingale is targeting.

Since Martingale’s technology solutions are a natural continuation of Ning’s, their sale two days ago to Glam Media for $150 million is noteworthy.  Groups on the Martingale platform are much more tightly integrated - each group has access to all relevant content and individual group members are able to specify what content they want to see or have hidden from them (for example, they can specify that they want to see only content pertaining to Circus toys made out of Bakelite in the 1950s in France AND Redline Hot Wheels).

We have carried out a number of experiments on the Ning platform and learned immensely from it.  In 2005, when we had not yet created Martingale, Ning was stringing together different web services to create a "social application”.  Later they allowed users to build their own social networks but found that most of those failed since they did not achieve critical mass.  On the Martingale platform you can have a very small group that can from the start have large quantities of highly relevant content.

Also of interest was when the company changed from its fremium model to a paid model.  At the time, Ning had been hoping that 9,000 of its 250,000 free members would make the switch to paid. Instead 50,000 did.  This made the company, with its more than 100 employees, profitable.  As such, it is interesting that we already have more than 110,000 members on our various group sites, with more than 2,500 new members in the last 30 days alone.

As it is we have a better model with no plans to move to subscriptions.  We think that enabling our members to trade in a eBay 2.0 environment will provide more and better revenues without the alienation of charging the very same people that add content to our sites.  So we wish Glam Media/Ning all the best and at the same time offer their collectible groups a new home, not quite as glam but with a much better fit and more content!

Toy Collector’s eBay-killing online marketplace for collectable toys and models is now fully operational, with all site users able to buy and sell.

Having launched in Beta mode in June, with access provided by invitation, the market is now fully-operational and open to the public. Initially, the focus is on vintage Dinky and Corgi Toys, with the intention of rolling out to cover other brands and areas of the toy, model and hobby market, catering for both antique and modern items, accessories and supplies. As of launch, several hundred items are already listed for sale, with more going up continuously.

Richard Hewis, trading as The Retro Trader has been part of the Beta launch and says: “I love the way the catalogue makes selling really easy and also how simple and straight-forward the rules are and predict that this will become my main channel!”

Read the Toy Collector's Marketplace announcement here.

eBay Australia told sellers today its new fee changes are aimed at encouraging professional and business sellers to list more Buy It Now items in Stores. "The changes will also enable eBay to better differentiate and incentivise professional, business and consumer sellers." The statement included other good news for us "Final value fees will increase from 5.25% to 7.9%" (not that Australia is by far the cheapest location for selling on eBay, for more on eBay's pricing see our Fee Comparison on Toy Collector) and that eBay wants to "encourage more fixed price items on eBay.com.au consistent with customer demand". We believe this is what eBay wants their users to demand as part of its Amazonification drive and know it is not what collectible buyers and sellers want.

Colin Rule was director of Online Dispute Resolution for eBay and PayPal from 2003 to 2011 and was recently interviewed by Auctionbytes (see here).  He came up with some good insights.

Inside Facebook Gold, a tracking service that shows country-by-country monthly active user counts, based on the data that Facebook provides in its advertising tool. It showed Facebook US draffic falling from 155.2 million at the beginning of May to 149.4 million at the beginning of June, but growing by 11.8 million monthly actives around the world to reach 687.1 million over the same period.

SMI did a report on Social Media Funding in the US (where 80% of our traffic comes from) and we were of course particularly interested in reading about the performance of Social Networks.

Larry Weber's new book "Everywhere: Comprehensive Digital Business Strategy for the Social Media Era is just out and getting great reviews (see for example on Amazon here).  For us the key statement in it is

"I think the social media world is micro-segmenting very quickly. For example, if you're somebody interested in diabetes, you go deeply into the top diabetes sites and forums and start sharing things. You could be on Facebook, you could be on LinkedIn - but increasingly they're adjunct kind of sites."

Both Amazon and eBay reported their numbers this week and again we have seen that Catalogue based marketplaces perform better.  Amazon is growing at the fast rate of around 38%. With a third of all items shipped on Amazon sold by third party sellers that segment has grown as fast (our marketplaces will be 100% sold by third parties).

Our Chairman Robert Dighero, with his partners Eileen Burbidge and Stefan Glaenzer has launched an early stage investment firm Passion Capital after working together on business projects at office space White Bear Yard in East London for the past two years.

Above Comscore's European numbers  how ad impressions served up on social networks is exploding (North America looks pretty similar).  Facebook and online retail, led by the Groupon-driven couponing craze is up with the big losers being instant messaging and, gulp, eBay. Investors, beware. It’s becoming increasingly apparent that these deal-of-the-day sites like Groupon are starting to eat into the online auction market.  Traffic to online auction sites and eBay in particular fell 3.6 percentage points last year.

We went to the toy fairs in London, Nuremberg and New York and believe this was the first time that a community of collectors and modellers exhibits.  Our Nuremberg "mini museum" ranged from a hand-made gun made by a Union Soldier in the US Civil War to a R/C Helicopter represented the varity of items already part of the 130,000 entires in ToyPedia.  Needless to say it was very popular with the visitors allowing them to hark back to their childhood and at the same time check out models newly introduced at the fair.  We have meta total of 287 manufacturers and received excellent feedback both on ToyPedia and the upcoming market place with 285 companies agreeing to participate!

Martingale is pleased to welcome FigureCollections to its portfolio of collector-related sites. Launched by Joshua Crawford who built the site from scratch over the last 18 months, the site has quickly become a favourite destination for the figure collecting community. We are excited that Josh is joining our dev team helping to build our new collection management. With its combination of social networking for collectors, database, figure ratings and showcase, Figure Collections fits right in with the Martingale strategy!

eBay reported good results yesterday.  Unsurprisingly, PayPal did great again, it now accounts for 38% of eBay's total earnings! But the announcement again highlighted again its weakness in our own favourite area - collectibles and auctions.

Got an email from Joshua Porter at 52 Weeks of UX with its usual good insights, this particular one was so close to what we do that we decided to syndicate it in full, here it goes:

Two weeks ago, the most prestigious investment bank in the world, Goldman Sachs, decided to invest almost 2 billion dollars in the social network Facebook (a mix of its own and its clients capital), which on paper made the six year old startup worth $50,000,000,000.

It has been almost impossible to find data on the size of the vintage and collectible toy & model market so that in the end we have done our own study.  When we met the folks from the Hobby Manufacturers Association or HMA at their event, the iHobby in Chicago they presented us with results from their their now annual survey.

Custom Communications has come up with A Short History of Social Media Screw Ups and we thought it was quite interesting...

ModelTrainForum.com and LGBWorld.com are joining Martingale’s existing sites, filling the model-train gap in the Groups portfolio and helping to build ToyPedia, Martingale’s catalogue listing every toy or model ever made in all every variant. This comes after Diecastaircraftaviation.com, DinkyToysBlog.com, HobbyTalk.com, Scale600.com, TinplateTrainTimes.com, Wings900.com and others have joined this year.

In response to overwhelming feedback from its site users, going forward, Martingale will be incorporating the Have-your-cake-and-eat-it strategy into its concept of community-driven auction platforms.

You know you made it as a social media site once there is a site poking un at you like regretsy (hysterical) and lamebook (not quite as good in our opinion).

While this is on tech firm we know the numbers are much worse for companies in the Collectible Sectors!

StrategyEye reports that global online ad spend will reach almost USD100bn by 2014 as the market returns to double-digit growth this year, according to figures from eMarketer. The research firm forecasts that revenues from online advertising will increase by 12% year-on-year in 2010 to hit USD61.8bn worldwide. Growth is forecast to continue at rates of more than 10% a year over the next four years, with spending soaring to USD96.8bn by 2014.

Just read this annoucement on StrategyEye:

Content providers in the US may now have to pursue copyright infringers themselves, rather than service providers, after Google   won a landmark lawsuit against Viacom. In the long-running USD1bn case, which Viacom brought against Google for hosting content from Viacom assets such as MTV on YouTube, a New York court indicated that Google is doing enough to fight piracy.

Toy Collector is participating in this competition.  Check it out here and please vote for us.

Martingale Internet Technologies launches new ad sales sites www.HobbyAdSales.com as a one-stop source for advertising or SEO services for the model and toy world.

Nice introduction to Social Media Marketing Maps by Stefan Principato(even if a little to PowerPointish for my taste).  Stefano's blog is called Valori Primi Lab.

Nic Brisbourne of DFJ Esprit wrote last week about his theory that most platforms start as applications:

So I’ve been thinking about how successful platforms come to be, and it seems to me that most of them start off as applications.

Found some of these blog posts by former eBay executives that confirmed our view.  Shripriya Mahesh, former Vice President of Corporate Strategy blogs under the title How not do do "innovation" how eBay for example rejected the idea of blogs for its members in 2003, did it half-hearted and too late in 2006 and abanded them in 2009.  It's a good read.

Time spent on social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Ning and Twitter jumped 82% during 2009, according to figures from Nielsen for December.

Martingale Internet Technologies, the leading provider of 2nd Generation Online Collectible Marketplaces raises substantial angel funding from a number of heavy hitters.  Investors include founders or early backers of a number of successful eCommerce businesses such as...

Wikipedia is the most popular and influential website in the world for the second year running, according to popularity tracking website ://urlfan. The site measures mentions and links in nearly 6m blog feeds, rather than web traffic, and claims to track the popularity of more than 3.7m websites. The service ranked YouTube in second position, up from third last year, followed by Flickr.

Robert Dighero, until recently the CFO of Tradus plc (previously known as QXL ricardo plc), has today invested in Martingale Internet Technologies.  During his ten years at Tradus Robert steered it through its start-up phase, rapid growth, IPO (a dual listing on Nasdaq and LSE) and eventually a £1 billion public take-over by Naspers. Prior to this, Robert was CFO of AOL UK between 1995 and 1998, building the finance function from scratch during its rapid expansion, at the same time becoming the most profitable AOL Europe operation. 

The Digital Mission is a trade mission from 15-20 November with only 20 selected digital businesses organised by the UK Trade & Investment (UKTI) and we are going to be part of it!  UKTI is part of the UK Government and tasks to help British companies succeed.

Paul brings with him over 20 years of experience in finance, strategic development and corporate governance to help the company during its current period of rapid growth.  He holds a B.A. in Economics from Hamilton College, Clinton New York and an M.B.A. from Columbia University, New York.