Pierce Spencer may not
quite be this year's version of the
Internet millionaire, but he's got the right instincts and he's still
young enough.
The 15-year-old just
wrapped up his freshman year of high
school at the Woodward Academy in Atlanta and, during the past few
weeks, has made almost as much money as he expects to take in this
summer working at a local restaurant.
It's one of those Internet
schemes, reminiscent of the
dot-com boom, where money is generated seeming from nothing: Pierce
buys e-mail accounts and sells them on EBay, a business he has so far
managed mostly during his lunch hour, between exams and after school.
He has Google to thank: A
planned free e-mail service from
the popular search engine has people so eager to get an account before
all the catchy e- mail account names are swept up that they're willing
to pay for one of the relatively few test accounts available now.
Pierce's biggest sale so far was $102.50 for an account.
Pierce is merely the
middleman. When a friend bragged to him
about having a Gmail account a few weeks ago, Pierce hadn't heard of
Google's e-mail service. Then he checked EBay and discovered a booming
business.
Though most auctions were
offering accounts individually, one
seller was selling multiple accounts, for a little under $30 apiece.
Pierce snapped up the accounts and resold them on the auction site, in
auctions that generally closed at around $60 each.
"I was freaking out
because I was expecting a $3 profit per
account," said Pierce, who has made more than $1,000 and is saving for
his first car (he has his eye on an Audi).
The final prices of
Pierce's auctions seem to rise and fall
without much rhyme or reason. Sometimes he thinks the sales have run
their course, then they perk up again. "It's like the stock market," he
said.
Pierce has sold, by his
count, more than 50 accounts. His
main supplier has been a Gmail early adopter who told Pierce he has
friends at Google who hook him up with accounts. Account holders
sometimes get chances to invite new users to the Gmail club; for
well-connected users with multiple accounts, the invitations can pile
up.
Pierce's father, Richard
Spencer, trades commodities online
with an Atlanta company called Intercontinental Exchange Inc., but says
his son's EBay business is over his head. "If you can figure it out,
you're ahead of me," he says.
EBay searches for Gmail
during a recent week turned up in the
neighborhood of 300 auctions. "If you just wait, (the Gmail accounts
are) going to be free, so it's all about getting the user name," Pierce
said.
Pierce's customers have
filled his user profile with positive
feedback in the excitable language of EBay ("Absolutely as promised!
Gmail account is up and working!! Kudos!").
Buyers typically say they
wanted an account because they
wanted to get a "good" name secured before Google opens the floodgates
and lets anyone grab an account. Art Neil, a tech consultant in
Redmond, Wash., bought an account on EBay out of respect for Google.
"They are really good writers and they put out very nice software,"
said Neil from his Gmail account, for which he paid a relatively low
$35.
Google, which has not
announced how long it expects Gmail to
remain in its test period, declined to comment for this story.
Greg Lastowka, an
assistant law professor at Rutgers Law
School, said he saw nothing forbidding the sale of Gmail accounts in
the "terms of service" to which would-be Gmail users have to agree to
get an account. For comparison, he checked and found that agreements
for both EBay and Yahoo's e-mail service explicitly forbid the selling
of their accounts.
Pierce's father wondered
about the ethics and legalities of
selling Google's free accounts online, but Pierce has convinced him
EBay would have shut auctions down quickly if it had any problems with
the practice. In any case, "no police cars have shown up yet," Spencer
said.
And it looks as though
none will.
"There's nothing in our
policies that
would cause us to pull those listings," said Hani Durzy at EBay. "Our
rule is that whatever's being sold must be deliverable. It doesn't have
to be physically deliverable."
