Some data for you

Gamasutra has an interesting article today about the Ebay activity of Wii and PS3s since all the madness started.

Here's the quick lowdown (in chart form created by yours truly, I'm a geek!).
The number of units sold (surprisingly) has been about the same. The huge difference is in the price increase. People are willing to pay a whooping 150% more for the PS3 while only 65% more for the Wii. This can, of course, be explained by the lower number of PS3's released (supply & demand, blah blah).

(Here's an interesting thing for number geeks like me. There were a reported 1 million Wiis released and 400 thousand PS3s, so approximately one and a half times more Wii's than PS3's. If you look at the percent increase that people were willing to pay, PS3's went for about one and a half times more than the increase in Wii's.)

So what's the big deal with all this Ebay madness? Well, if you tally up all the numbers and averages (and keep in mind this is averages so not scientific by any means), Ebayers made approximately $28 million in the hype so far. Ebay itself, with a 3% cut of the action, only made about $1.4 million (double that if everyone used PayPal).

$28 million is a huge number but was it worth it? Let's see. Let's assume the average Ebayer waited in line for 6 hours. If you add up the consoles sold (57,684) and multiply that by 6 hours waited per console, you get 346,104 hours. At a total gross profit of $27,935,485 for all consoles auctioned, that comes out to a nice $80.71 pay rate for waiting in line. (At that rate, for those 6 glorious hours, the Ebayers had an annual income of $167,885)

And that, my friends, is why we have the madness.

Now feel free to cut apart my math and assumptions and talk about shipping costs and travel costs and all that stuff. =)