Christie's is confident that online bidding has huge potential that can be unlocked at modest cost.
Online bidding tends to be strongest for items that buyers can preview elsewhere, such as watches, jewellery, wine and photographic prints.
That is one reason why Christie's has been slow to introduce online bidding in its high-end evening sales of contemporary art.
Christie's said nearly a third of its bidders last year shopped by bidding online, a 2% rise from 2010.
The catalog has been scanned onto McInnis' website, where potential buyers can see the artifacts in their full-color glory before deciding on bidding online.
In an unexpected four-hour sale, 52 percent of bidding was online and created a frenzy.
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Real-time bidding for online display is more efficient from a pricing standpoint, said Bob Arnold, Kellogg's associate director of digital strategy.
Participants were then presented with a variety of products and asked to assess their monetary value using several methods (to ensure that no single method produced a particular result), such as bidding in an online auction.
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This is made possible by Real-Time-Bidding technology that enables online display ads to be auctioned off in real time.
But Wiedemann, who founded the direct marketing unit of Grey Global Group (nasdaq: GREY - news - people ) and until a few months ago was running Responsys, a Silicon Valley online marketing firm, does the bidding of one of America's most implacable bosses: Chicago billionaire Samuel Zell .
Forrester Research estimates that real-time bidding will constitute 18% of the online display-ad market this year, up from 13% last year.
Krux estimated that such auctions, known as real-time bidding exchanges, contribute to 40% of online data collection.
Feng, who lost his 8-year-old son in the quake, posted an essay, "Many Ifs, " on his blog an hour before his suicide, bidding goodbye to his family, friends and others online.
But the speed and flexibility of online ad buys, especially considering the increased use of ad exchanges and real-time bidding, represents a blessing and a curse for web-based advertising.
In an apparent effort to protect its hefty share of the online search-advertising market, Google on Sunday accused Microsoft of trying to unfairly dominate the Internet by bidding for Yahoo!
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