[meteorite-list] Chelyabinsk: six months of eBay sales

From: Matson, Robert D. <ROBERT.D.MATSON_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu, 29 Aug 2013 11:26:32 -0700
Message-ID: <7C640E28081AEE4B952F008D1E913F1708229357_at_0461-its-exmb04.us.saic.com>

Hi All,

If anyone is interested, for the past 6 months I've been compiling the
closing prices, masses and sellers of eBay Chelyabinsk meteorite sales
in an Excel spreadsheet. The dataset is quite large now (1250 points)
and includes all eBay sales of Chelyabinsk masses greater than or equal
to 3 grams. (Best-offer sales were not included since that price is not
reported by eBay.) There were a few sales that did not provide masses
(though clearly higher than my 3-gram cutoff), but since I was
interested
in tracking the price-per-gram metric, I excluded them.

A summary:

Total auctions: 1250
Period covered: 2/27/2013 - 8/28/2013
Total mass: 22192.6 grams
Total cost: $248,393
Average price-per-gram: $11.19

Since price-per-gram obviously depends a great deal on the quality of
the specimen (percentage of crust, overall shape, degree of weathering,
whether IMB or not, evidence of orientation, presence of flow lines or
roll-over lips, etc.) I tried to add notes for each sale estimating the
percentage of crust, presence of weathering, whether the specimen
appeared to be an IMB, or anything else I thought relevant.

If enough people are interested in the spreadsheet, rather than email it
individually to each person perhaps someone can host it for me.

Having spent over 30 hours over the last 6 months compiling all this
data, I probably won't continue to update it much longer. I figured
the nearly quarter-million-dollar sales mark was a good hopping off
point to mention it on the List. I think you'll find the master plot
of the PPG over time quite interesting, and I wouldn't be surprised if
this is the most detailed price history of a meteorite ever constructed.

Best wishes,
Rob
Received on Thu 29 Aug 2013 02:26:32 PM PDT