The key to making a competing venture work is the same as the key to making ANY online venture work: traffic.
Just putting it up and saying "here it is" isn't going to drive the traffic to the site that it will need in order to generate A) enough listings to make it worthwhile, and B) enough bids to satisfy the sellers.
This community, while a GREAT part of the hobby, is just that - a part of the hobby. When you start looking at the dollars that change hands on eBay in the card category alone, I think the magnitude of it gets daunting.
So basically I'm saying that the winner will do a LOT of marketing, pre-launch, will secure a decent amount of sellers, pre-launch, and will have people chomping at the bit, waiting to bid when the service goes live.
Once that's done, next comes the hard part of keeping the traffic steady after the launch is done.
I wish the best of luck to whoever tries it. I know that I'm barely looking at eBay anymore since they eliminated the "pre-1930" category. But I also know that there are lots of other, well-capitalized companies that have already tried to go head-to-head with eBay and thus far have failed.
-Al
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