My First Dollar Earned On The Internet

Back in the summer of 1994, the "World Wide Web" was still in its infancy. There was no E-Bay, and no Amazon.com. At that time, the internet was mainly a set of tools called Telnet, FTP, Usenet, +finger, some email software, and precious little else. At some point this year a web-browsing tool called "Mosaic" appeared that had some techie-types really excited --- a big improvement over Gopher. Mosaic would eventually become Netscape Navigator, and would usher in the era of the Web as we know it.

But at this point, nobody was really talking about it. The Internet was still a friendly, reasonably safe place where mostly techie and academic sorts dwelled. I was in both categories, in my final semester at BYU, and had an Internet connection through school.

At this point, the big fad was Magic: The Gathering, the first Collectable Card Games (CCG's). This made a fortune for the company that created it, and it later went on to make even more money doing the same thing with Pokemon cards. But at the time, it was Magic: the Gathering (MtG) that was making the rounds. Wizards of the Coast, the company that created the game, was starting to release expansions for the game, with new collectable cards in limited quantities. Previous expansions had led to a tremendous feeding frenzy, with entire stocks dissapearing from store shelves within hours (or minutes) of going on sale.

An enterprising acquaintance of ours had picked up a full case of "booster packs" for the most recent expansion, "Legends." They'd just started becoming scarce, and he wanted to see if he could sell them and make a little extra money. He thought selling them online and hitting the "global" market might work, but he had only a vague notion of what the Internet really was, and no clue as to how to actually sell things online.

I didn't have much of a clue either, but he asked for help, and I accepted. I'd take a percentage for my efforts. After a bit of discussion, we decided that the way to make the most money would be to break open the packs and auction individual cards online. I reasoned that half the rare cards alone might sell for much more than a random booster pack.

The auction was done through USENET posts (before there were web forums, there was USENET), with interested parties using the "+finger" command to see the auction status for the cards. After about two weeks, I closed the auction, emailed the winners, and had to go through all the individual checks and money orders that came in. I decided to have my friend deal with actually SHIPPING the cards.

All told, my take on the entire experience was somewhere less than $100. I spent over 30 hours on the project, and I estimated I made just a hair over $2 per hour. Less than minimum wage working at the local McDonalds. My partner, who made the initial investment and had less work to do but had a higher percentage of the yield, was somewhat more satisfied with the return. Though I did end up with a heck of a lot of leftover cards at the very end - common cards that had either not been bid on, or we'd never received payment on, or from some missing boosters that my partner hadn't even opened.

I figured that was an absolutely horrible way to make money, not even close to worth my time, and never tried it again.

Alas, compared to making indie computer games, it was a gold mine. But the indie game thing is a lot more fun.

Labels: Biz

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