Whatnot Is Worth What Now?

I now turn to the frustration that many longtime collectors are feeling over modern social media buying and selling platforms like whatnot.

For those of you asking: “what is whatnot?”, the best way to describe whatnot is to envision a social media livestream merged with an amateur live auction of eBay-style dreck. I offer 1979 Topps commons for auctions to a bunch of yahoos with nothing better to do than to sit around streaming the auction and making comments in the margin while they bid on said commons.

I don’t see the appeal. Many others don’t see the appeal. Vastly more do.

Investors get it. The cash is rolling in for the site: the company has raised a total of $968 million privately, with its most recent funding being a $225 million Series F round in October 2025 that valued the company at $11.5 billion. Those are not misprints.

How can this social media site filled with amateurish sellers hawking mundane, second-rate crap and rampant shill bidding possibly be worth that much? Has the whole world fallen off its axis? What are you damn pesky kids doing on my lawn?

I hear you. I understand that frustration. Many more seasoned collectors see whatnot as a perfect expression of all that is wrong with newer collectors and the go-go cash-crazy modern hobby. But is it really that different? Once I get past the emotional reaction, I say not so much. In fact, it is more democratized than the traditional hobby markets; call it eBay with benefits.

Think of it this way: a venerable traditional auction house like Sotheby’s and Whatnot are both sellers of second-hand goods. Whatnot is kicking the crap out of traditional auctioneers and raising nearly a billion dollars in financing because its structure simply is more efficient and as a result its appeal is broader. The cost of scaling up is the key. An auctioneer takes possession of the items it sells. That means legacy real estate, employees, insurance, catalog printing and mailing, etc. It also has to fulfill its orders, which means a packing department, materials and equipment. For an auction house to expand using its business model requires more capital investment, both physical and human capital.

Whatnot never touches a tangible item. It doesn’t store or insure squat-diddly. The sellers act as their own fulfillment departments. The marginal cost to add another seller and his items to the offerings on whatnot is essentially nothing.

As a result of the different models, each model has a different poole of potential clients. An auctioneer has to take a relatively large cut of the gross to keep the lights on and the champagne chilled. It can only handle items that are sufficiently significant to be cost effectively sold using its model. Many potential consignors are unable to meet the necessary valuations, so they are shut out. The high lot valuation also necessarily shuts out a large pool of bidders who simply cannot afford to bid on anything a traditional auctioneer sells. Whatnot has essentially no floor on value of items sold. It takes a far smaller cut of the gross. As a result, it allows essentially anyone to be a seller or a buyer. Literally anyone. If you want to see drunk, gross, racist, disorganized, moronic, shilling sellers, check whatnot. You’ll find them. Auctioneers are no Simon-pure enterprises, either. Sotheby’s, for example, has been nailed for tax fraud and price fixing.

I gave livestream selling a shot, I really did. If you got three days to relive, what would you do? What would you not do? If I could get back a specific three days, it would be the three days one Thanksgiving weekend that I spent selling cards on whatnot. I found it so exhausting that on the third straight day of selling, I drifted off at the wheel and wrecked my car on the way home from the office. True story.

I cannot think of a less efficient method of moving cardboard than whatnot selling. The social media base combined with the auctioneering is a lethal combo. If you are going to do it right you have to create a listing for each card, with details and photos just like eBay. Then you must schedule a show and sit there live online for hours trying to convince rubes to buy the items you want to sell while serving as their combination evening entertainment and baby-sitter. Not to mention the hours you must spend on other live streams on whatnot making witty comments trying to get the attendees there to follow you and begging the other sellers to ask their audiences to follow you. Add to that the freebies you have to run to get your live stream up the algorithm pecking order to draw in potential buyers who aren’t following you (seeing the question “givvy?” in the comments on my live stream on whatnot made me throw up in my mouth, just a little; why don’t you stand on a street corner with a sign and beg for free cards instead?). Ditto the constant need to feed the social media (Instagram, Facebook, etc.) monster with promotional material to draw audience. I’m way too lazy for that kind of time suckage. Once I get a card loaded into my eBay store, I just sit back and wait for the world to come to me. No need to spend five hours of my life looking into a camera and coaxing yokels into buying a midgrade Aparicio card. I just don’t like people enough to spend hours being their dancing chimp.

The good thing about whatnot’s valuation is that it yet again proves that value is merely perception. The stock ‘market’ is just the intersection of two conflicting bets on a company. It is delusional to think that there is intrinsic usable value to anything except that which one can hold and consume or wield to force others to turn over their consumables. The mindset that drives people to play on whatnot and drives it valuation is merely the democratization of the driving force of all investment: money. We pile up the money because it buys security, safety, health and freedom in our Ferengi-lite society. The players today are perhaps more nakedly crass about it, but they are no different than we were. “I create nothing. I own,” said Gordon Gekko…38 years ago. We all want to own. The social media marketplaces merely allow us all to own our own businesses. That is why traditional auctioneers are grinding their teeth at whatnot.

And you thought scrolling through fishing videos was a time-suck…