I got a press release recently touting the fact that Vonage is selling through the Buy.com marketplace:

[via email]

VONAGE® TO SELL ITS SERVICE ON BUY.COM® THE INTERNET SUPERSTORE

Offering its Service on One of the Nation's Leading Electronics E-Commerce Retailers Gives Consumers More Options When Seeking a Flat-Rate Calling Plan

Edison, N.J. & Aliso Viejo, C.A., October 19, 2004 - Vonage Holdings Corp., the leading broadband phone company, today announced Buy.com, the Internet Superstore will sell its services on its Website, www.buy.com. Vonage is pleased to offer its industry transforming calling plans on the nation's leading electronics E-commerce site.

Got me to thinking about interesting ways to package and sell Corante's inventory of ad space, as opposed to doing it the old fashioned way (sales guys calling folks up on the phone and pitching) -- or even the supposedly new way, like GoogleAds or BlogAds.

So I created an eBay Store over the weekend: stores.ebay.com/corante. And I posted the available stock of ads for Get Real and Strange Attractor, two blogs that have had some biggish ad sales recently. For example, starting Nov 1, both Get Real and Strange Attractor have their Premier Ads sold though May, and Get Real's Lead Ad A is sold through the end of February. In the upcoming weeks, we will be adding other blogs' ad stock to the store's inventory, as well as cross-blog sponsorship options.

The options that eBay offers to its sellers are a bit restrictive for what I am trying to do. In the perfect world, I would like to have an ongoing auction starting as soon as I post an ad slot at the store, and completing say two weeks before the ad is going to run, with a "buy it now" price. But eBay auctions are not very configurable: you can't have an auction that runs until a specified date. And even a 10 day auction costs more than the default seven day auction. So I have defaulted to setting a fixed price on each sort of ad.