The Number of Michael Jackson Items on eBay

Sep 2009

The untimely death of Michael Jackson on 2009-06-25 provided an opportunity to watch people try to cash-in using eBay. I had previously seen eBay items where the seller was clearly trying to take advantage of current events to make a sale, so when I heard about Jackson's death I realized that it was a rare opportunity to watch the sort of frenzy that happens when a one-of-a-kind "big event" occurs that by it's very nature would involve the sale of memorabilia: The unexpected death of a major celebrity.

Unfortunately this idea didn't occur to me until a half-hour after I heard about Jackson's death. However, this didn't affect the data at all as the initial spike was captured, what's missing is knowledge of what the steady-state item count was before Jackson died. I began gathering data on 2009-06-25 at 1530 PDT by making a search on ebay.ca for "Michael Jackson" (no quotes) to see how many items would result. At that time there were 2,525 items. Twenty-four hours later that had ballooned to about 17,000. The peak occured after seven days when 36,589 items were available, after which the expected decrease began with only a few oddities along the way.

Here's a graph of the data, plotted by gnuplot. The only data recorded were the time and the number of items. Any other data are in the sellers' hands and, of course, eBay's.

It's a rather telling sign of our society that there was a tremendous increase in the items available beginning the day of the memorial service but there was no change at all on the day of the funeral. I guess the memorial was for show whereas the funeral was for family.

Note what looks like a cyclic pattern that repeats about every three weeks: The three bumps peaking at 29, 52, and 77 days, possibly beginning with the first peak on day 7. I wonder what those are from?