Posted on: Tuesday, June 8, 2004

Selling 'Gmail' pays off for teen

By Mike Musgrove
Washington Post

Pierce Spencer may not quite be this year's version of the Internet millionaire, but he has 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, over 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 seemingly 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: An upcoming 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 today. Pierce's biggest customer so far paid $102.50 for an account.

Pierce is merely the middleman. When a friend bragged 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.

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.

Searches on the term "Gmail" during a recent week turned up in the neighborhood of 300 eBay auctions.

"If you just wait, (the Gmail accounts are) going to be free, so it's all about getting the user name," Pierce said.

As for the legalities of selling free accounts, "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."

Google, which has not said how long it expects Gmail to remain in its test period, declined to comment for this story.