Once upon a time, after what optimistic folk call “the first bubble”, some entrepreneurs, realising their web startups would never amount to much, eschewed the traditional sell-off path (hire a banker for a search, endure due-diligence, negotiate a price) and chose a different exit route - eBay (NSDQ: EBAY). Well those days may be here again…

—Amigo: On Tuesday, Bath-based web firm Carsonified’s founder Ryan Carson will put his email newsletter service Amigo on the auction site, with a $25,000 starting price, after admitting he “failed pretty badly” to maintain the site in his free time.

—Basic Thinking: Now Robert Basic, author of popular German blog BasicThinking, has put the six-year-old site up for auction. Basic claims to have made €37,000 last year partly from banner ads and says the site got 185,000 uniques last month. “Anything between €10,000 and €100,000 is conceivable” as a winning bid, he wrote - though the low chance that anyone want want to write a blog named after someone else has led to speculation it’s a traffic-chasing stunt.

—Sock and Awe: Last month, Alex Tew, the brains behind the Million-Dollar Homepage experiment, earned £5,215 through eBay for Sock & Awe, his latest viral web game in which players are invited to hurl shoes at President Bush.

So eBay-as-exit-route may be back in vogue. But what chance other chancers flogging their mini-enterprises through the auction site? Some of the original companies to go this way included GoldenFeed, Kiko, Huckabuck, CrispAds, Zookoda, Jux2, Livelocker, FeedYes, Shoutcentral, Mojungle and Eros. Most of them are still going in some shape, but they’re hardly household names.

Photo Credit: Cheon Fong Liew

• Carsonified Selling Amigo Newsletter Ads Service on eBay